Dreamland
by Midwich Cuckoo
Summary: Neverland starts to show its real face. Is there more about this world of eternal summer, joy and freedom and its inhabitants than meets the eye? And what does JM Barrie have to do with it?
1. Ice Peter

**Beta:** Purple_ Shamrock_17 (Thank you VERY MUCH :-) )

**Disclaimer:** The whole Peter Pan concept doesn't belong to me but to JM Barrie and that is good; if I were him, I'd have already been dead for the half the century.

**Chapter one: **Ice Peter

Once – but when was it? – he was a little boy from the sunny Neverland. Together with a group of loyal friends, he used to spend whole days splashing in the warm waters of the Mermaid Lagoon (from time to time, in a sudden surge of courage, teasing its inhabitants) and roaming the Neverwood in search of a new great adventure.

Those times already belonged to the past. Nibs was a grown up now: tall and fair-haired, dressed in some kind of strange white coat which was the only white spot in the blackness he was drifting through. "It's a smock, a doctor's smock," thought the Lost Boy (man?) to himself; all of a sudden he just knew this word, not having heard it previously. Nibs knew something else too, this new awareness suddenly just filled his head. He realized that his consciousness somehow… existed on two planes, like he was split into two versions of himself, both able to observe each other in horror but not without some fascination. One of them identified him as an adult, a man whose job was to help the sick, while the other one knew that he was just a kid, a member of the group of the Lost Boys and that something was wrong. As wrong as could be possible. The latter half had an unpleasant feeling that the boy's childhood was leaving him, oozing out of him drop by drop for the benefit of this man, this other Nibs was. The boy was experiencing odd vibrations like this part of him which still belonged to a child was slowly being torn away from him. The temperature of this dark place in which he was floating became colder and colder.

"No… I don't want to…"

"Nibs!" Someone's warm hand tugged at his sleeve, bringing him back to reality. In one moment the boy/man was exploring the mysterious space in which there was nothing except him, feeling scared and alone and the next he was lying in his bed in the underground home he knew so well.

He remembered that while Peter and the rest had set out on a journey in search of a potential new and great adventure that morning, only he and Cubby, both not feeling very well, had remained behind. Now his companion was sitting at his side, looking at him with a solicitous face. "You screamed. What were you dreaming about?"

"I don't remember much," Nibs lied in a whisper as he recovered from his… nightmare? If he thought about it, maybe it wasn't exactly a nightmare in the full sense of the word and it was evaporating from his head surprisingly fast. However it left behind an impression of stupendous reality and strange terror, quite like it deserved the status of reality while merry moments in Neverland were merely an illusion, an extremely realistic deception that they were all taken in by. For a moment Nibs felt overwhelmed by fear and sadness like something was coming to an end and he couldn't stop it.

"I was an adult. I was a… neurologist." he added, pulling the word, now almost forgotten, out of the chasm of his mind.

"Who?"asked his friend, surprised.

"I don't know myself. It was just a dream and dreams are weird and…untrue." This last word was spoken a moment later but without any hesitation, as if the boy wanted to assure himself of its truth.

The boys were alone in the underground house. Tinkerbell, Peter and the rest of children, including young Tiger Lily who was given permission from her father to spend the day with her friends were out. They had set out on a Great Adventure journey. In Neverland, an adventure lay in wait for the bold eager to make the acquaintance with it behind every tree in the Neverwood, you only needed to find it. The adventure could be pleasant but also as scary as in the case of Nibs' dream. Even if, objectively speaking there was nothing about it he should be scared of.

"Let's go to look for others," said Cubby, trying to console his companion. Nibs wiped his eyes with his hand, getting rid of the remnants of the sleep and nodded. Joining them was a much better idea than thinking about bad dreams which weren't true after all. Both of them knew where their friends were going to play and searching for the Greatest Adventure Neverland could ever have up its sleeve with them, seemed the best solution for them.

Half an hour later, both boys were walking in the Neverwood, with every step leading them closer and closer to the place where the Lost Boys usually camped, taking pleasure in the humming emerald green grass coming up to their knees and the sun shining straight in their tanned faces. They found the place that they sought easily enough. It was in the form of a small clearing, shaded by the circle of trees that surrounded it. Normally, the silence there was broken only by the chirping of birds and the playing kids's cheerful voices, now though Nibs, still shuddering a little at the memory of his dream had an occasion to find out how much truth there is in the old saying, when it rains, it pours.

The first thing they saw after their arrival at this oasis of fun and pure joy that was known only to the children, was a gloomy procession the sight of which made the boys' hearts stop for a moment. At the head of this sullen parade of scared and pale children were the Twins, carrying Peter Pan's body. The golden silhouette of Tinkerbell shedding a flood of tears was twirling above their heads. Wendy and little Michael were also weeping. Slightly and Toddles were holding some mysterious items but Cubby and Nibs had no time to take a closer look at them because their whole attention was directed on Peter, motionless and looking as if he were only asleep.

"Is he…?" asked Nibs softly.

"No, he's alive," answered Tiger Lily. She must have been as scared as the rest of them, but managed to remain composed. An Indian princess had to learn to keep her feelings under control. On the way to the underground house Nibs and Cubby heard the whole story about what had happened to Peter.

Their leader, together with the whole band had set out in search of the Great Adventure farther than usual, believing that it was awaiting them at the Mermaid Lagoon. If it was indeed waiting for them there, it was then going to be the prologue to an adventure, yet interestingly or not, it was going to be a very bad adventure as something was wrong with the lagoon.

It had dried up.

The friends found its inhabitants scared and begging for help. In the face of danger, the mermaids gave their usual tricks up and didn't feel like playing with Wendy in a cruel way like they had during their first meeting when they had tried to drown her. Even if this idea dawned on them though, its realization wouldn't be ever possible. "Let's throw this human girl into the water!" But to what water? They would only be able to arrange a mud bath for her at the very best. Thick brown mud filled the lagoon as far as the eye could see. The once beautiful place was now a boggy swamp in which the terrified fish girls were stuck. The mud that the crystal clear water had turned into wasn't the only foreign element in there. While trying to pull the mermaids out, the Lost Boys noticed a few strange items sticking out of the quagmire. They pulled them out as well and these were the things Toddles and Slightly now held. Wendy and John were able to recognize some of them. They were the items from their world.

Tinkerbell, not without some virulent comments used her pixie dust on the inhabitants of the lagoon (well, ex-lagoon, now it wasn't anything else but a disgusting swamp) to make them able to fly and the mermaids flew away to a different, better place where the water was still clear.

Having completed their task, the group decided to take a look at the mysterious objects. According to what Wendy and her younger brother said, they belonged to their world of London. Peter, always curious decided to touch them. And it was the moment when the Great Adventure turned into a Very Bad Adventure. The boy's eyes widened and then his eyelids fluttered close while his face became deathly pale. Then, Peter staggered and not without some ghastly grace, fell on the ground. For the next several minutes, his friends made some futile attempts to revive him but their efforts were for naught. They picked him up then and decided to carry him back to the underground house to deliberate on what should be done next when they met Cubby and Nibs in the Neverwood.

As they neared to the house and Nibs listened to the story, he started to recall his dream again. The story moved something in him. It seemed that a Bad Adventure turned into the Bad Day, the official inauguration of which was initiated by his nightmare. Yes, this day had to be really bad and this suspicion turned to certain dread when the Lost Boys (and three girls, one of whom was additionally a pixie and still resentful of the fact that she had had to use her precious dust to help the mermaids) finally entered their house.

During their absence, something had changed. An ice statue stood in the middle of the underground home. There had been nothing like it in the house before they had set off to find their Great Adventure but now there it was, reaching almost up to the ceiling. The very presence of it wasn't the strangest thing, however. It was its face. In an amazingly (and ghastly) realistic way it resembled the face of their now ill, leader. Yet it wasn't exactly Peter as a boy; it was a face belonging to a man very stricken in years that resembled how Peter Pan would probably have looked like if he had reached old age. The statue's eyes hid in the folds of wrinkles carved by the passing years and the cheeks covered with furrows were droopy. The Ice Peter was smiling slightly: a roguish smile which was so well known to his young companions and to all children who ever met him in their dreams about Neverland.

The children looked at the ice man with a mixture of surprise and shock and not at all sure of what they should do. They didn't dare to touch it; after all it was touching an unfamiliar thing which had made their leader sink into a state of catatonia. It couldn't be only ordinary fainting, the Lost Boys couldn't deceive themselves about this anymore.

Then, unsure of what else they could do, they decided to put Peter to bed. His eternally young face was a sharp contrast to the one of the old Peter made of ice. The mysterious objects taken by his friends from the Mermaid Lagoon where they had appeared there so suddenly were placed on the table, carefully laid there by Slightly and Toddles. The band distrustfully started to inspect them – if the boys could safely touch them with no harm in spite of what happened to Peter when he had, they couldn't be that dangerous.

Wendy spoke up first. "As I already told you at the lagoon, I recognize them very well. These are from the world where I and my brothers come from. I don't know how they arrived in here and how touching them could harm Peter but they are rather usual things that people from our world use." Pointing one by one at the items covered with the drying up mud from the lagoon, the Lost Boys' mother explained their application to them.

Among the objects, so ordinary for the inhabitants of the world the young Darlings arrived from but so foreign to the members of Peter Pan's circle, there was a pair of children's winter gloves, made of dark green woolen yarn with a P.P monogram.

"P.P. like Peter Pan," explained John as none of their friends from Neverland could read.

There was a pair of skates with shining sharp blades. The Lost Boys had to be instructed what use they were of as the concept of snow and ice was completely unknown to them; there was eternal summer in Neverland. Although the figure which appeared in their house so suddenly, even if not touched by any of them gave them at least some idea of what ice was. There was a doctor's stethoscope (Nibs with a sudden shiver recalled his dream once more time, now sure that there must be some connection between it and what was happening before his eyes now). A brochure advertising Great Ormond Street Hospital. A worn out photo of a young boy about Peter Pan's age, very similar to him but wearing clothes resembling that children from the Darlings' world wore. Among the objects there was also found a strange rectangular shaped one made of black plastic, with a small glass screen at the top and a row of buttons with digits below. Above the screen the mysterious inscription "Nokia" adorned the item. Neither Wendy nor her brothers had ever seen anything like it before. They didn't even try to guess what it could be.

The children had never before felt so helpless. Not only did their leader lie pale and unconscious (any attempts to wake him up from something that only at the beginning seemed to be just ordinary fainting were completely futile) but they had absolutely no idea as to what should be done and what connection existed between the objects found in the mermaids' realm that had become a quagmire, the Peter like figure made of ice and finally Peter himself. Because it was obvious it had to exist. And that something about it was very wrong.

If even they didn't have such a feeling, what happened next made them certain of this. The temperature of the air got colder. Tiger Lily went outside to see what happened and came back very excited. "Look at this," she said softly when she returned and the children followed her outside to witness what she had. Nothing could have prepared them for what they would found once they climbed out of their underground home.

In the place of the former eternal summer, as far as the eye could see, spread out a white surface. White… and cold. Something was falling from the sky, now gray and gloomy not blue as it used to be before the sinister change took place. These were white flakes, melting in contact with the children's warm hands as they reached out to catch them. The inhabitants of Neverland would've looked at this amazing spectacle of Mother Nature much longer, since they had never seen anything like it before. But suddenly from behind them, Peter Pan who, up until that point, had been lying in a lethargic torpor, moaned softly.


	2. The Old Man

**Chapter two: The Old Man**

Like Nibs before him, Peter floated slowly in darkness. Everything was darkness. Since there was no other color to darkness than the impenetrable blackness that surrounded him, nor smell or temperature, Peter had absolutely no idea where he was. And like his friend before him, the young leader of the Lost Boys had a weird feeling of being split into two – the feeling that Peter Pan had never had a chance to encounter. It was strange indeed, Nibs would agree with him on this point, for sure. The one half knew exquisitely well he was the intrepid Peter Pan, the conqueror of Hook, a friend of mermaids while the other one was shouting to him that it wasn't true. That he was someone else. A different boy. A boy living a completely different life, for whom the world of the pirates, mermaids and pixies was a mere fantasy. And even deeper, hiding in the nooks and crannies of his mind lay another layer of this new knowledge he had suddenly accessed, now whispering importantly into his ear that even _this_ other existence wasn't real. This awareness was followed by sadness and the feeling of something (the Neverland?) coming to an inevitable end, regardless of how much the boy tried to remove this scary thought from his mind.

Nibs, if asked, would be able to recognize this feeling too.

Peter floated through the darkness as if he high in the sky, albeit he was a bit afraid (although it was something he would never admit to his friends) but also excited, as he always was when a new adventure entered his life. He couldn't see himself and when he reached to touch his body, his hands (what hands?) met the emptiness, like the boy was a bodiless nothingness, barely a spot in the space which now was changing.

The darkness which had surrounded him, now narrowed down to a cylindrical tunnel with white sparkles glittering on its walls. The sparkles grew up, assuming the shape of the faces of his companions. Although blurred and vague and almost deprived of color like the faces of ghosts, beyond all doubt they were the faces of the people he knew. The Lost Boys, their mother and her brothers, Tinkerbell, the pirates and Indians – all of them looked at him now. Some of the faces, however didn't belong to the people known to Peter, were adult – or in case of the grown ups, childish - versions of themselves but still amazingly resembling their original selves. Wendy Darling, Peter's "mother" was a woman approaching her forties, the same with Tiger Lily, smiling sweetly at him from the wall. Hook in turn, if it was him indeed, seemed to be the age of a boy who was just entering puberty, not older than twelve, Peter guessed. He was wearing glasses and an unpleasant smile was frozen on his face. Smee's motionless face stared at him from the wall as well. Although in this version he was just a boy with chubby cheeks marked by the first pimples. Adult Nibs was there too – if it could be him at all since the small beard that he was wearing was making him less recognizable. More and more faces appeared on the black walls of the tunnel, the length which couldn't be endless as the boy realized. At its end a tiny light appeared, getting bigger and bigger as Peter approached. He had no body but he could feel that it become much colder. Nibs would have also recognized this feeling, had he been with Peter.

Then, in front of Peter Pan's face or where it would have been, small clouds of vapor appeared and despite having no nose, he breathed in the icy air.

A couple of feet more and the boy was able to look more closely at the tiny light. It was no longer a tiny light but had turned into a kind of large mirror, the edges of which were coated in ice. Peter could easily see through it and view what was happening on the other side.

And his eyes widened in amazement at what he saw through the mirror.

A small room, similar a bit to those he used to see in the world from which he took the young Darlings. But the resemblance stopped there. The nursery in the Darlings' house was warm and comfortable while this room was white and unfriendly. The central area of it was a bed made of metal pipes painted white as were the bed clothes that were covering the man resting in it. The man was old, sunk into a deep sleep. The rising of his chest from his delicate breathing was the only sign that he was alive. Peter couldn't see his face too clearly although he realized something strange that caught his attention more than the man's identity– the tangle of thin tubes coming out from his thin arms below the rolled up sleeves of his blue pajamas. Their other ends were attached to some mysterious machines sitting near him. Other tubes, much thicker this time came out from the old man's nostrils, disappearing in the viscera of the machine. A small screen showed a complicated thin line surrounded by digits that were completely useless to Peter.

The fascinated boy wanted to touch the surface of the mirror, however when he reached out his hand, it changed, turning into cold fog, shielding the view of the white room with its sleeping inhabitant. In Peter's ears strange tones resounded, his mind twirled like the boy remembered something strange he couldn't know. Some memories that couldn't be his (the one about a skating rink coming to the top) returned to him for a short moment but before Peter could analyze them, the tones resounded one more time and the image of the black space faded away, replaced by ordinary darkness surrounding people after they close their eyes.

His eyes were closed indeed so he opened them then and when he did, he found himself lying on his bed, surrounded by the children and Tink hovering over his face, shedding tears of joy.

"He's alive!" the pixie sobbed, wiping her eyes with her tiny hand. Rarely had he ever seen her showing her feelings so openly except when she sulked, so he was all the more delighted at this outburst. Peter didn't remember the details of all that had happened during the day all that well now. The memory of him touching the mysterious, amazingly realistic picture of a boy who had looked a lot like him which had resulted in the…vision? Dream? was very vivid, however Peter Pan wasn't sure exactly what it was that he had seen. Was the sleeping man from the white room a real person?

It was like Peter hadn't left the black tunnel at the end of which was the realm of the old man whoever he could be (assuming he wasn't just a product of his imagination) for good because the temperature of the air was much lower than he remembered it ever being in Neverland. Peter licked his lips and asked the question repeated throughout the centuries by those have suddenly woken up and are unsure as to what has happened to them: "Where am I and what happened?"

"You are at home," answered John and one of the twins simultaneously.

"You fainted," added Nibs. Their leader's mysterious "illness' or whatever it was, again involuntarily woke up in him the memory of his own dream. It seemed so real. What if he didn't wake up from it? He could have laid like Peter, unable to communicate with his friends who were grieving for his fate. These thoughts were pure craziness, triggered by the stress because of Peter's fainting but he couldn't get them out of his head and after every attempt to do so, they came back.

Peter Pan, informed about what had happened since the fit of his… illness, could now easily recall everything, starting with the events at the Lagoon. However, regardless of how hard he and his companions racked their brains, none of them could come up with any explanation. They all were sure though that his fainting couldn't have been a indication of anything good since the white flakes falling from the sky outside, covering everything with white sticky fluff, convinced them of this.

Despite all of these mysteries and feelings of unease, the boys, shivering a bit, started a snowball fight. Then, the Darlings explained to them what a snowman was, so the boys' next step was creating one, bearing a resemblance to Captain Hook and threw snowballs at him until the snow pirate fell into pieces. Even in their clothes made of animal skins they felt cold which prevented them from continuing their play, so they went back inside to deliberate on what they should do next. The winter might be an interesting change but if it was to last longer, their chances to survive were small – especially if it was how the whole Neverland looked.

The ice figure still stood at the middle of the house. Cold and unmoved. It wasn't showing any signs of melting. Nobody dared to touch it even with a tip of their finger, its appearance was so sudden and held such a ghastly resemblance to Peter that it involuntarily commanded respect. Any of the Lost Boys couldn't complain of the lack of courage but fighting pirates was one thing and an ice stature of an aged Peter Pan, was something reaching far beyond their previous experience.

Peter shared the details of his vision with his band. In ordinary circumstances they'd say it was a dream and nothing more, but the sudden and dangerous change that took over Neverland killed in them any thought about consoling each other in this way. It seemed this… snow thing didn't want to stop falling. The Darling siblings had witnessed this weather phenomenon in London many times and it was normal for their world. But in such a land like Neverland where the summer never ended, it was something abnormal. Tiger Lily proposed that they should go to her village, to see whether this amazing climatic change also concerned the place where her tribe encamped. Slightly was for dividing the children into pairs and checking how the situation in various parts of the island looked like. However, before anyone had time to comment in any way on this, Nibs spoke up. "I have something to say to you. I don't know if it means anything but I think I should share this with you." Eleven pair of eyes looked at him, as if at his words there suddenly burned a small glimmer of hope in the children's hearts and that, as impossible as it could seem, their friend had found some solution on how to reverse their frosty predicament. Nibs unexpectedly felt a little silly then. His dream had frightened him but at the very moment when he announced he wanted to say something, he got a feeling his story was just ludicrous in the context of what was happening. What if his friends mocked him and told him to shut up because now wasn't the best time for talking about dreams, regardless of how scary they were for those who had dreamed them? Or they would tell him to shut up and stop joking because they didn't have time to listen to his silly fears and had to think about what to do next. And that his nightmare didn't have anything to do with what was going on or that it's resemblance to Peter's dream was just a coincidence.

Encouraged by the children's hopeful stares, the still embarrassed boy told them about his dream and as he was going on with telling, his voice was getting more and more quiet until it completely died away. When the Lost Boy finally managed to finish, he lowered his head and fixed his eyes on the floor. His breath formed small clouds of vapor in the unexpectedly cold air. He expected sneering laughter the moment he had finished speaking and looked up in surprise when it did not come.

The children looked at each other. Such a coincidence in the face of the danger that had approached Neverland, hovering over it like a sinister cloud from which white flakes were pouring out, threatening to coat the whole island with their white cold pall, just couldn't be accidental. Nibs' and Peter Pan's visions were too similar to remain ignored. They looked one more time at the ice Peter, as if they hoped it would deliver them some form of answer when Tinkerbell, for the first time since Peter's revival spoke up. "If we are to find the answer to what is happening to Neverland, we must go to Pixie Hollow."


	3. Natalie Willoughby

Pixie Hollow was a place fabulous even by the Neverland's standards, literally dripping with magic which seemed to seep from every corner of it. It was here, in the shade of the Home Tree towering over the valley that the next generations of fairies who each had some kind of specific talent, grew up, wallowing in the luxury of eternal happiness and laughter. If there was ever a place which fully deserved the name of the very heart of Neverland, it was Pixie Hollow. And it was the place that Tinkerbell proposed to go for an answer as to what was happening to the whole land, in hope that her sisters, whom she had left there, would be able to find it. If their magic couldn't find an answer – and who knows, maybe even a solution – then nobody was able to do it.

That was three hours ago. The children were flying now, fighting the gusts of the cold wind off which considerably slowed their flight, and shivering even though the snow storm had already ended. After the first attack of winter, the cold flakes had stopped falling but the amount that had already fallen still shone down below.

From the height they achieved, Peter Pan's team could easily see the extent of destruction stretching out all over the land they knew so well but which just now was almost unrecognizable. Some parts of Neverland didn't exist any more, and left behind big gaping holes of nothingness in the landscape. What was even more strange, was that winter didn't prevail everywhere because from up above, every now and again before the children's eyes appeared green spots of land where winter didn't reach. It was these areas that they landed on to regenerate their strength before their return to the cold and wind and the strange sky which seized them with fear. The sky was odd: livid, crossed with flashes of lightening time after time; what was even more unnatural was that they weren't accompanied by thunder which would have infallibly happened under normal circumstances.

Yet, when Peter and his companions landed in one such part of Neverland which remained untouched by winter, they were able to find even more items lying there, resembling those taken by them from the Mermaid Swamp (since it really couldn't be called a lagoon anymore). They found syringes, clocks, pens looking unlike those the Darlings were used to – small objects, hard to notice in the luxuriant grass, growing in those small oases of verdure as if nothing had happened. Their biggest find however struck them with such awe that they still couldn't shake it off.

It was during their first stopover. This part of the Neverwood above which they flew when they noticed it, was very small, barely a scrap of land not much bigger than the room which could be taken by their underground house, clearly distinguished from the world of winter around. The children sat on the ground, stupendously warm, as the area maintained the same summer temperatures that Neverland had had before winter had taken the whole Neverwood over. When suddenly, Toddles pointed at some rather low elevation behind the clearing, covered in snow like everything else there and asked in a hysterical voice which wouldn't ever be expected to be heard from a Lost Boy: "What is that?!" The boy's friends turned back, unsure what he was asking about. Peter went out for a moment and came near the mysterious mould. The children watched him dig up the snow and carry the object with some effort, still partially covered with hoarfrost and came back to them.

It was a frozen body of a mermaid.

It was the ginger haired one who once was the first to make an attempt at drowning Wendy. Streaks of orange hair, now stiff from the frost, partially covered her body. Her dead glassy eyes were fixed on them. There was no wound on her body, not one at least which could be seen at the first glance so the reason of the fish girl's death must have been freezing. It was only strange how she could find herself in there, alone and far from her companions. The other strange thing was that the dead girl couldn't now be described as a mermaid any more. In the place where she used to have a tail, there was a pair of human legs, not any different than those of Wendy. The aforementioned girl vomited at this sight, the same as Tiger Lily and Cubby. They preferred not to take a closer look at the dead former mermaid. So using this as an excuse, they soared into the sky, while the others covered the frozen body the layer of snow on which had just started to melt in the warmth of the glade with flowers growing there in quantities.

From that time they found a few such places, untouched by omnipresent winter. Fortunately at least none of those contained such a macabre find as the dead mermaid. Now Peter Pan and his young companions were on their way to Pixie Hollow, observing the changes altering Neverland. Some of the places familiar to them vanished or were replaced by others. The pirate ship instead of rolling on the waters of the bay, mysteriously disappeared from there and stood now amidst the trees, partially dug in the ground, its inhabitants however had vanished as far as they were able to judge it. In some places there were strange bluish fog whirls hovering in the sky, like weird portals leading to an unknown world. The children did their best to avoid them.

This festival of grimness taking place before their eyes caused the start of the first doubts to sneak into their hearts. The solution could be waiting for them in the Pixie Hollow – but didn't need to. Even fairies didn't need to be resistant to what was happening; nobody could guarantee their magic didn't stop working in the face of the danger. Or that they, together with the Pixie Hollow still existed.

Tink rode in Peter's pocket. At least she didn't feel cold. Although the idea that other pixies knew magic and maybe they'd be able to use it to cure Neverland with it came from her, this conviction grew smaller and smaller in her with every mile they covered. Even fairies weren't all powerful and Tinkerbell swore at herself for instilling such unshaken hope in the hearts of her friends.

They were getting closer to the realm of the fairies. They were lucky enough to travel the distance of the last couple of miles separating them from it in under cover of summer – they met another spot of verdure spreading out in there which poured new hope in their hearts. Maybe the Pixie Hollow still existed and its inhabitants were already working on the ways of reversing the whole misfortune. The surge of hope which had rebuilt some of their strength, turned out to be deceptive when they finally entered the kingdom of fairies.

Whatever forces were destroying Neverland, didn't have mercy on the home of the fairies. The powerful Home Tree so far towering over the valley, lacked the strength to resist them in this last moment. Now its pieces lay on the ground, like it was destroyed by an explosion. The part of Pixie Hollow which surrounded the tree was practically the only one which didn't cease to exist. Yes, the majority of the valley didn't exist any more, instead of the land there was that strange bluish fog floating just above the ground, resembling the portal-like whirls that the children had previously seen in the sky. Nevertheless, the children rushed to look for the pixies. Tinkerbell stayed, completely broken. She was too afraid to even look at the remains of the tree, in awe that a closer look at them would show her the massacred bodies of her friends who found their death under the boughs of their falling home. It seemed nothing could be done now, as if the destruction of the realm of fairies had taken away any hope that was left. The little pixie threw herself to the ground and burst into tears at this revelation. She remained so for the next minutes, unable to move. Her tiny golden body shaking with sobs.

Then, Tink heard someone's steps and then a familiar voice behind her back. She recognized it but still didn't dare to look back. The little pixie was sure her own ears were deceiving her. She delayed checking it for as long as she could but the owner of the voice was the first to speak. "Tinkerbell!" The fairy finally let herself stand up and cast a glance. It wasn't a delusion as she had feared. It was Rosetta, sitting on Peter Pan's shoulder. A few other fairies she knew so well – Silvermist, Vidia and Fawn were also there, hovering over the heads of the Lost Boys who, it seemed, had managed to find them.

Half an hour later, Tink and her friends learned the whole story as conveyed by the fairies. Despite the hope they had cherished, even the Pixie Hollow hadn't managed to avoid the fate of the rest of Neverland and the destruction of the Home Tree and the twirling "portals" made of the blue fog which were everywhere weren't the only sign of it. None of the inhabitants of the Home Tree lost their lives when it had suddenly started to fall to pieces (here Tink sighed with relief) but many of them underwent a terrifying transformation. As strange as it could sound, they turned into rug dolls. The children pulled them out from under the pieces of wood – little fairy dolls, like those taken from a bedroom of a little girl fascinated with fairy tales. Once living beings, now rag toys, put in a row, like they also were listening to the story, looked at the pixies and the children with their empty eyes embroidered on their blank faces of pink fabric. The rest of the pixies must have vanished into thin air as their bodies weren't found anywhere, while some other ones, like under the influence of some evil spell cast on them, followed in the direction of the fog portals and entered them to never return.

The worst change however took place in Iridessa. The poor pixie couldn't be even known as a pixie any more because as strange as it sounded, the result of the change was her transformation into a human. The black skinned magical girl was now a human woman, kept in ties by the magic of her companions which was necessary, as in addition something had happened not only with her body, but her mind as well. In other words, poor Iridessa had gone insane as that was the only thing that those around her equate it to. She lost consciousness every now and again and after recovering her senses she didn't even recognize her companions, much to their horror. She forgot about her whole life in the Pixie Hollow, claiming she was someone else, that her name wasn't Iridessa but Natalie Willoughby and that she was a nurse. She kept repeating that she wanted to go back to London, where she had come from.

"Take us to her," said Wendy suddenly, widely opening her eyes at the very mention of her home. A human female from her home world? Could it be?

The only thing that had prevented the strange woman once known under the name of Iridessa, a light fairy who was one of Tinkerbell's best friend in this realm of magic, from her taking to flight and entering one of the mysterious portals of fog was magical fetters quickly put on her by her friends, scared by what they had just seen but still keeping their presence of mind. Her ankles and slim wrists glistering from the droplets of sweat which gathered on her dark skin from the strain were held by golden bracelets the material of which was pure magic. They could be very thin and almost as ethereal as mist but apparently strong enough to hold her down, not allowing her to follow the impulse she was doing everything to obey which ordered her to enter one of the portals as so many other fairies had done before her. She must have been very frustrated to have one such portal so close to her – a glistening fog with a subtle bluish light veil of mist just behind her back - but yet so distant because of the fetters not letting her go anywhere. When the children and the fairies saw her, the woman tussling in her ties was letting out low irritated grumbles which stopped at the very moment when her eyes rested upon them. In her gaze glinted new hope.

"Are you real?" she asked them.

"Real? What do you mean by this? You aren't having hallucinations, if that's what you mean," Wendy replied cautiously. It was she who insisted on seeing the woman into whom Iridessa had turned so the Darling girl felt she bore the responsibility for keeping up the conversation with her and figuring out who she could be. The girl never had an occasion to meet Tinkerbell's friend before but if the woman really used to belong to her species (Wendy had no reason to raise any doubts about the truthfulness of the fairies' assurance on this), the change she had undergone was so far going that even having seen all those strange things happening in Neverland, Wendy couldn't believe this young, undoubtedly human woman could ever be someone else than she was. _Well, the dolls were once real fairies too_, Wendy thought to herself, shaking off the last of her doubts. If the toys she herself had held in her hands could be once living beings (although the world she came from denied their existence) according to the other pixies' words, why could it be less possible that the twenty something chocolate skinned woman lying before her struggling in her magical ties, was once a fairy?

"Help me," said the woman. Any remnants of insanity glinting in her big brown eyes left her at that very moment, they were now vigilant and focused. "I don't know what has happened. I don't know if it's me going crazy but those… pixies," (here, the woman smiled slightly, pronouncing this word in such a voice as if she found incredibly ludicrous the very idea that she, an adult could ever speak of magical beings otherwise than in a jest) "those pixies," she repeated, smiling nervously, "call me Iridessa and claim that I am one of them. They don't believe me that I'm Natalie, I don't even know of any women having such a weird name as Iridessa but they think that I'm crazy. That I don't know who I am." She finished in a low voice as she lowered her head.

When she lifted it again, sudden hostility sneaked into her voice. "Well, in case you prefer to believe them and not me, if you all prefer to believe them, then let me repeat it to you one more time." Here, Natalie/Iridessa averted her eyes which had become narrower from Wendy, fixing them on the pixies instead. "I'm Natalie Willoughby, not Iridessa but Natalie, I'm twenty-eight and I'm from London, I have never been any kind of a pixie, hag or other tooth fairy but a nurse, yes nurse and everything I want is to come back home. I'm Natalie, N-A-T-A-L-I-E, not Iridessa." A note of fear, mixed with sadness appeared in her voice when the woman kept spitting her words out. "I even don't know exactly how I found myself here. I just saw this fog—" A weak nod of her head towards the mist behind her, "and when I went near it, I came through it and that's how I arrived here. Let me go back. I was just taking Mr. Barrie's temperature when I saw the fog… fog…"

Miss Willoughby's voice became strange and had a dreamy quality to it, like she was swimming off into her own world to which nobody besides her had access. "Fog." It was the last word she said before the wild look returned to her eyes. Natalie's flood of words prevented Wendy from asking her any questions they could have about her life – who Mr. Barrie was or how a Negro woman could ever have gotten an education and become a nurse were the first that occurred to her – but as much as she would've liked to ask them now, it wasn't possible any more. Natalie Willoughby who was once Iridessa was unconscious or maybe only sleeping – her eyelids were fluttering like she was dreaming about something – maybe about her London or maybe this version of it in which a black woman could be someone else other than a servant. Those small movements of her eyelids and her breathing were the only signs she was alive.

The wall of the mist barely a few feet behind her was moving gently, as if matching the rhythm of the young nurse's breath. It seemed to change shape and it wasn't an illusion, the shapeless silver and blue wall of non transparent twirling fog which, as Iridessa/Natalie said, was an entry to another world, was slowly assuming a form of a door of some kind.

The children and the fairies stared at the portal mistrustfully. It seemed to hypnotize them gently. The more they looked at it, they all felt a vague feeling that something important was hiding behind the door. The door, although nobody knew what they were to expect upon entering it, was in a strange way tempting. The temptation of the fog that the pixies couldn't resist going through even though they had no idea what was waiting for them on the other side, slowly started to overcome them all as they stared at the strange door.

And the silence which appeared when their legs and wings involuntarily started to lead them towards the portal, waving slightly, was broken only by the sound of the voice of Peter Pan which was gentle and languorous, very much unlike his true voice as he said, "The greatest adventure is waiting for us there."


	4. Jimmy

If asked, they'd never be able to answer the question of how much time they spent in the corridor that opened before them when they entered the portal made of blue fog. Swallowed by the fog door, they lost any sense of time, unable to feel anything as if an all encompassing feeling of detachment to everything enveloped them once they entered the portal.

As such, they were only vaguely aware of their legs leading them through the tunnel that opened up within the fog, moving almost without their realizing. Because they were so oblivious as they made their way through the tunnel, they were even unaware of the sudden flashing of memories in their heads and then vanishing from them instantly, before the children had any chance (or would have had if not for the state they were in) to muse over them. For a moment, the memories made them believe that they were someone else, living in other places and other bodies which weren't the bodies of children. It was as if some disembodied voice kept whispering into their ears that their life in Neverland wasn't real and now the time was coming in they would discover that this—the fact that Neverland did not exist—was their reality.

Since they were in this trance like state, they didn't pay attention to the images of the adult versions of their faces which appeared on the walls of the corridor stretching out behind the entry made of the bluish mist. They certainly would have raised some memories in the captain of the tribe of the Lost Boys, had he been aware of the images. The same could also be said for the small light that suddenly appeared at the end of the tunnel.

As they drew near to it, the light started to turn into something else assuming the look of a hoary mirror. The surface of which was veiled by mist making it impossible for the children to look through it. Although the mirror looked very solid, it had to be immaterial because the hypnotized children were able to pass through it with ease.

It was when their sense of awareness came back to them that the children were able to fully take in their surroundings and were able to catch a glimpse of the portal as it closed up behind them. The air of the room that they now found themselves in was apparently dangerous to it as it twitched for a moment and then disappeared as if it had never existed.

With the portal gone, the children turned to study the room that they were in. The place was very familiar to Peter Pan, now he could fully see it, liberated as he was from the influence of the mist through which they had all arrived by. The room gave him a chance to remember his vision that had followed from his sudden fainting and he realized that the one in the vision and the one that he was standing in now were the same. Both were painted white, with a bed just as white and sterile in the middle and was the only piece of furniture in the room besides a small table close to the window and a similar one near the bed. The person lying in the bed remained the same: a very old man with his eyes closed, even the arrival of Peter and his band was unable to rouse him. There were numerous tubes of varying thickness coming out of his lean hands and the nose only to disappear into the weird machines that were covered in a number of buttons of various colors standing close to the bed.

Then, Peter stepped closer to get a better look at the sleeping man who still didn't move as he approached – his sleep must be very deep, Peter thought – and his eyes widened in an expression of shock.

The face of the mysterious old man, sleeping just in his faded but immaculately clean blue pajamas was the face of the ice statue which appeared in their house in Neverland. And, given the resemblance that the statue bore to Peter Pan himself, the old man looked like Peter – if the boy reached old age.

Nobody said anything, as all of them came to this revelation until little Michael, before others managed to hold him back reached out his hand and grasped the man's pajama sleeve and gave it a hard jerk. But this jerk did nothing to make the man regain consciousness He lay there as he had when they had arrived; still and unmoving, in his bed.

On the clean, white walls of the room, there were hanging corkboards onto which were stuck some black and white photos along with some pieces of paper with writing on them. The small nightstand and the one near the window whose vivid blue curtains, blew softly from a mild wind also covered up various cards and photos. These photos showed a boy in various stages of life—from babyhood up until about late preteens; the child looked very much like Peter.. The boy in the photos was also very similar to the old man however strange it could sound. In the light of the sunrays falling on his sleeping face, yellowish and covered with a net of deep wrinkles, his face with delicate facial features seemed much younger, almost boyish, almost like he was about the age of Peter Pan, the boy who despite the age difference by some weird coincidence resembled the stranger so much.

John was the first whose interest was aroused by the old looking cards with their corners tucking up and photos standing on the night table. He took them in his hand, and began reading aloud what an unskilled hand written in them: "Jimmy, get well soon", "We hope you will get well and be able to spend this Easter with Mummy and the whole family, son", " Happy seventeenth birthday", "We love you and wish you fast recovery, Jimmy" – the wishes repeated themselves, expressing the hope that "Jimmy" would soon recover from his illness whatever it was and whoever this Jimmy boy was – rather it couldn't be the inhabitant of the white room because if it was him indeed, he must have grown out of the age in which one still has living parents who would like to spend Easter with him and being called Jimmy instead of James a very long time ago.

John's interest in the issue of the identity of "Jimmy", suddenly woken up by the get well cards led him to one wall whose only decorations were two boards filled with press cuttings of a great variety coming from various sources. The boy started to read them aloud although their content wasn't too happy nor too interesting unless one were a friend or relative of young Jimmy who though, judging by the lapse of time that passed since the first newspaper clipping had been released to when the last one had come out, wasn't young any more.

The clippings that John read aloud to the others went something like this:

"From "Arbroath Herald" 30 January 1936: "Young Kirriemuir Inhabitant Suffers Skating Accident".

" 'This winter's skating did not finish well for James Matthew Barrie, age 11 from Kirriemuir who the previous day slid on a skating rink, hitting his head on the ice. The hurt boy was taken to hospital unconscious where the doctors took care of him. We wish young Jimmy a quick recovery."

From "The Montrose Review", 26. March 1936: "Injured Boy Slips into Coma."

"Jimmy Barrie who in January of this year suffered head injuries in a skating accident still hasn't regained consciousness. The boy has in fact slipped into a coma. Doctors are afraid young Barrie could have experienced severe brain damage. If his state doesn't change in the near future, the boy will be transported to the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London where he can receive better treatment from brain specialists."

From "London Daily", 17 January 1939: "Will Jimmy Ever Wake Up?"

"The third anniversary of the accident of Jimmy Barrie, the most famous long residence patient at Great Ormond Street Hospital, one of the best known children's hospitals in London is fast approaching. Young James who will turn 15 in May this year has remained in a coma since the accident three years ago. His family prays for their son's recovery. "It would be the most beautiful present for us if our son was to wake up on the anniversary," says Mrs. Margaret Ogilvy Barrie, the boy's mother. "We all miss our angel so much. He was a wonderful child with an amazing imagination, always amusing our family with his made up stories."

From "London Daily", 1 September 1952: "The Boy Has Slept For Sixteen Years"

"James Matthew Barrie who was transferred to the Royal London Hospital from the Great Ormond Street Hospital several years ago still keeps the status of one of the most famous medical cases in Great Britain. The young man's state has not changed since the brain injury he sustained in the thirties in Kirriemuir, his hometown as a result of a skating accident. Only Mr. Barrie's closest relatives still believe in their son and brother's regaining consciousness one day. Some signs show their hope for the miracle may have its rational basis – the nurses taking care of the young man claim on some occasions they have felt some movements of his hands, as if he were partially conscious. We hope these are the signs of his recovery."

From "The Sun", 12 Novemeber 1985: "Was Barrie's Accident Purely Accidental?"

"Shocking news around Great Britain. A childhood friend of Mr. Barrie, the famous "Sleeping Man" who has remained in a coma in the ward of the Royal London Hospital since the accident which took place before the World War II has contacted us and admits the accident was his fault although he fails to give an evidence to support his claims. "It was me who pushed Jimmy on the ice," the man admitted and also asked us to not give out his name. "We quarreled and I wanted to punish him. I didn't want it to be like that. Qualms of conscience don't let me live peacefully, I had to tell it someone." Respecting his identity, we will let our readers know him only by his initials: J.H."

From "Kirriemuir Herald", 11 February 2010: "Is the Dream Coming to an End?"

"Is the dream in which the whole life of our most famous inhabitant, Mr. James Matthew Barrie has passed finally coming to an end? Doctors of the Royal London Hospital in which Mr. Barrie, who has remained in a coma since 1936 resides, say that his health has begun to deteriorate. The sleeping man has developed severe respiratory and heart problems which as the doctors fear, may contribute to the fatal breakdown of his health. Mr. James Matthew Barrie will turn 86 in May, the last 74 years of which he has spent sleeping. "

John stopped reading and slowly turned to look at his friends, who were staring at him with equal looks of shock and disbelief. In the room there was silence, broken only by the soft noises uttered by the machines that had kept Mr. Barrie alive for the last half century.


	5. Dr Junaid's Story

As they stood around the bed of James Barrie, they still wondered how they came to be there and what the physical resemblance between the old man and Peter might mean; their whispered voices (they didn't dare raise their voices for fear that it could attract somebody's attention; the issue of explaining who they were and how they had come to be there would be too complicated) resounded in the sterile whiteness of the room. The story of the man who had spent almost his whole life sleeping, oblivious to everything, made a huge impression on them. The Lost Boys and their friends racked their brains over the mystery of the hospital room (Wendy and John had previously explained to them the concept of hospitals) in which they found themselves in. The only conclusion that they had managed to come up with during the five minutes of their heated discussion (which had developed after John stopped reading the clippings) was that they needed go out of the room and explore this new place where they found themselves in order to decide what to do next. After the first changes had begun to occur in Neverland (which now seemed centuries away to them) the children had developed a habit of discussing the steps that they should take instead of going headlong into something, which they had done previously. This change was partially due to their current situation and their unawareness of what exactly was the right thing to do in such a strange world. They could also use the discussion as a good excuse to mask their fear and thus postpone them from regretting a decision later, had they jumped headlong into it as they had done before.

Whatever decision of finding a way out of the unexpected situation that they now found themselves in, they didn't have time to agree on a course of action. Slightly was trying to convince his friends that the best thing to do would be to open the window and just fly away in order to get a better perspective on their new surroundings, when he was abruptly cut off, and remained frozen with his mouth open as the doorknob grated and the white painted door opened.

For the woman who entered the room, the sight of the children gathered in the small room was undeniably a much bigger shock to her than it could have been to the young runaways from Neverland. The woman, wearing a sort of a white gown like the one in which Nibs saw himself during his dream from which everything started, dark skinned and attractive – in fact, very resembling Tiger Lily thirty years later – looked like she saw a ghost. That was the only way in which her reaction to the children she saw so unexpectedly could be described. Her mouth painted with dark red lipstick opened , creating a perfect "o" shape, her eyes widened; the strange lady, frozen on the spot, like suddenly her legs were stricken by a sudden paralysis, raised her hand to cover her mouth, as if not trusting herself that no sound would come out of it.

For a moment, as long as eternity, the woman stared at the children with a look of complete shock, unable to move. She blinked several times, as if hoping that when she opened her eyes the children wouldn't be there. Her lips moved like she was going to say something but before she managed to do it, in a great rush of strength, grabbed a key she pulled out from her pocket and with one fast movement closed the door with it. Having doing this, the woman turned round to ask hoarsely: "Who are you?"

She resembled, at this moment poor Natalie who used to be Iridessa before. The Natalie who had wanted to know if Peter Pan and his friends were real. This feeling grew even stronger in the children when the woman in the white frock mumbled to herself, "They are real."

The events of the next ten minutes could be summarized as the never ending flood of questions and answers on both the sides. Who the mysterious newcomers were, why they were dressed in animal skins, if the little fairy who was with them was a real fairy, what the place they found themselves in was and how they found their way into it. Both sides, having cooled off the initial shock were doing their best to answer the questions asked to one another.

The dark skinned woman's name was Salima Junaid; she was a doctor in the Royal London Hospital – the place they were now. The woman, embarrassed with her exaggerated initial reaction – they were just children, even if wearing their animal skins costumes they weren't a horde of wild beasts going to rush at her – tried to explain the reason of her fear at the beginning. It was going to be a long story but she had to share it with them; they needed to know it, having a right to the truth about them, even if Dr. Salima was wrong about her theory.

"A moment ago you asked me why you arrived in here and I told you I wasn't able to answer this question," started Dr. Salima, carefully, leaning on the small table under the window. The children sat on the floor, listening to her words greedily. In her high pitched sweet voice, so similar to the adult version of Tiger Lily's voice if she could speak thirty years later, a note of barely audible foreign accent appeared. "I don't know if the answer I gave you was a good answer though. We have a lot of time now," she added, looking at her watch. "The nurses aren't going to appear in here today until something wrong starts to happen but I'm not going to call them now. I have already finished my work which means I can spend here as much time as I want. Anyway, the nurses aren't that willing to come to this room when they are not being asked for, you can believe me on this. You'll understand why, when you know the story. You mentioned you had read the clippings." The doctor pointed at the old newspaper articles pinned up to the board at which the children nodded. "You are familiar with Mr. Barrie's story. That's good because there aren't too many things that must be added by me so that you could understand my theory on what you are doing here and what happened to the whole Neverland of yours. Mr. Barrie's story may be – and probably is – strictly connected with it."

Here, Dr. Junaid took a deep breath and looked at the old man's bed before she started to speak again. "As you know, this man has spent practically his whole life except for childhood in the state of dreams. We call it a coma. He was sleeping all this time since he hit his head on the ice but now, as he grew old, his state of health started to worsen rapidly. And many odd occurrences started to take place in our hospital. Yes, your Neverland wasn't the only place where strange things happened recently. Very strange things." The doctor repeated, putting emphasis on this last sentence. She broke off for a moment to take one quick look at "Jimmy", lying in his bed in his faded, blue pajamas, as if the man could have chosen this very moment for waking up and then continued. "Items from his room disappeared mysteriously, not being taken by anybody, as if they just fell to another world." The children exchanged looks for a moment at her words. They knew where those missing items had gone to.

"I saw it with my own eyes sometimes and I think some nurses could have seen it as well. I don't think any of them would admit to this for fear of being labeled as stupid and superstitious but I heard the rumors. Anyway, why would be they so scared to come in here?" Dr. Junaid asked herself, quietly. "The things disappeared. They were here at one moment and at another they weren't there anymore and there was only me in this room, nobody could have put them in another place when I wasn't looking. I came here many times to spend some time with Mr. Barrie. I had my reasons to do it but I'll tell you about it in a moment. Some things that disappeared were my pen. Or my stethoscope when I took it off my neck and put away on the table. My mobile phone even. Even the objects that decorated Mr. Barrie's room. All those fairy and mermaid plushies from his table. Someone could think it was funny to bring them to him, he wasn't a little girl nor even a little boy any more for that matter, of course. But in some sense, it was like he _was_ still a boy – if he ever woke up, he would not know he was adult, like he was frozen in childhood forever. Jimmy – it's easier for me to think about him as Jimmy not the Mr. Barrie that he never had a chance to become – was Scottish and their tradition is full of fairies and similar entities. He would have liked them if he could see them on his table. His family brought them to him – his siblings, later their children and their grandchildren – he became a family legend. But they all disappeared. The same as this little pirate ship in a bottle that stood here as well. Jimmy had it as a child. Nobody stole it, I'm sure. The hospital workers were too afraid to come in here as I said. I was probably the only person who wasn't. I'll tell you why but you must wait a bit for this part of my story. So it went. Some other things that never were in here, materialized in this room as well – children's toys, skates, gloves – like the ones Jimmy needed that fateful winter. There were also other mysterious things Mr. Barrie was the center of. The dreams. Dreams about Neverland if you prefer to call this land that. I wasn't the only one who had them. Dr. Kimball, he is one of my best friends in this hospital, told me he had a series of dreams in which he wasn't himself but a little boy who lived in an island where there weren't any adults with his friends. Dr. Kimball is a neurologist, a brain specialist. It was he who takes care of Mr. Barrie most in here.

"There was also the frost which suddenly started to cover Jimmy's bed. I saw this two times myself but I bet there must have been more times. That's why others were afraid of his room too, for sure, if they saw it indeed. The temperature got much colder in the room then, I could feel it. It was just as cold as it had to be on the day when he fell on the ice and hit his head. Or that nurse, Miss. Willoughby. She got insane and they claim it could have been the influence of this room but I'm not surprised at this – what else could be thought if a normal, healthy woman comes in here and after a couple of minutes runs away, screaming she doesn't know where she is and that it isn't her body? She's in the mental health ward now. She claims she's someone else, a fairy and that her name isn't Natalie but Iridessa. They hope she'll get better soon but judging by what I think I know about what's happening, I wouldn't be so sure of this."

The children didn't say anything as the doctor's voice trailed away. They listened attentively to the story that had been delivered to them, trying not to drop any of her words in which she was explaining the mystery of the changes taking over the whole Neverland. And the lonely room with the sleeping inhabitant in the Royal London Hospital as well, which was the conclusion from Dr. Junaid's story. The appearance of this woman who seemed to hold the key to the solution of this riddle, was unexpected but was a real gift from fate. If not her, they would not know what to do, groping for the answer they might not ever find while the answer for it seemed to be just being handed in to them on a silver plate. The woman's story harmonized with what they already knew – the mysterious objects pulled out by them from the Quagmire of Mermaids which apparently came from this world, Dr. Junaid's friend's dreams being the opposite reflection of the dream of Nibs, Natalie who became Iridessa like the two females – human and fairy ones were two sides of the same coin - the mystery started to unravel. But there was something more to Dr. Junaid's story as she had stated; she had some reasons to be interested in Jimmy's case which led her to his hospital bed again and again making her the only person not being afraid all those mysterious phenomena he was the center of which and this was the thing they waited for her to explain.

Then, Dr. Junaid closed her eyes, as if preparing to share with the children some story the details of which she was trying to elicit from her memory. For a moment the only sound she made was her breathing, slow and rhythmical, until the woman opened her eyes, looking at the faces of her young guests filled with hope. Her mouth opened one more time and the woman started to speak again to share with them the other part of her story.

"When you have heard the second part of what I have to say, you will know everything," she started. "I dare to claim you aren't going to like this but that's the thing I must share with you because I'm the only person who is competent to do it. And this is what I want you to know.

"When I was a little girl I had an accident similar to this which fell to Jimmy's lot. What happened to me then when I was in coma then is what I base my theory on as to what is happening with you now. I fell from the stairs visiting the house of my relatives in Pakistan and hit my head. I wasn't in coma for as long as James Barrie – just less than three months – but that was enough for me to create an imagined world in my head. From the very scratch. I was nine then. I was a child with a vivid imagination. I was lying in a hospital bed all the time but in the dream which was taking place in my head I was in another place. Somehow I managed to build the whole world in my imagination. I lived in it until I woke up one day. I thought all the time when I was living in this dream that it was real, I didn't ever question its reality because when I immersed in this world I forgot completely who I was. I thought I was a different girl. Everything in that world came from the life I used to know before I found my way into it, transformed by the power of my imagination. The name of the girl I was in that dream world wasn't Salima Junaid. It was Anne Shirley. I don't know why but it was my name in this dreamland and I never hit upon an idea to question this. The same as I never questioned that I lived in Canada in the 19th century, not in the early 1970's in England. My family and friends I had there were also just the products of my imagination, all of them. I still remember this well. Diana, my best friend in the world I created in my own head when I was lying in coma was based on our neighbors' daughter. She was a couple years older than me, already a teen and I always looked up to her. I wanted to be like her. She was so pretty and nice, like an older sister I always wanted to have. In the dreamland she became my peer so as we could play together. There was also this boy, Gilbert – that was at least what his name was in there because the name of the real "Gilbert" I knew before I became comatose was Chris and he was my cousin. In the dreamland I lived with a couple of elderly people who took care of me. Their names were Marilla and Matthew. Matthew was based on my music teacher whom I liked. Marilla… well, shortly before I had that accident I saw a photo of a woman looking like her in some magazine. I remember I thought she looked so friendly and warm – like a grandma I always wanted to have. It was a happy life I led in there but three months later from the accident I woke up. I remember how surprised I was, realizing it was just a dream."

The doctor looked at Barrie and then at the children before she continued, "James Barrie has been in a coma since he was eleven. For such a long time he could have created a world similar to mine. In fact I am sure of it because I don't know any other reasonable explanation on how you found yourselves here. The strange things that happened in the hospital I told you about previously, confirm this theory. And my dreams do it too. I had a coupleof dreams in which I was a girl living in an Indian tribe on an island. They were very realistic but it wasn't until I saw you for the first time in here when all the fragments got organized into a coherent whole. It was a shock for me to see you here because I recognized you from my dreams instantly. Especially you." The doctor pointed her finger at Tiger Lily on whose face the look of surprise reflected. "You look exactly like me when I was nine or ten years old. It's like seeing a photo of myself from childhood.

You, boy," continued the woman, addressing Nibs, "very much resemble Dr. Kimball whom I told you about. Although much younger, of course. He is about my age, I'll be thirty-nine this autumn. This child," The doctor continued, pointing at little Michael "is the spitting image of Mr. Barrie's sister's great grandson. I saw him when the whole Barrie family paid a visit to him last January. It's a tradition to visit him on the anniversary of the accident. He doesn't recognize them, of course, but they do it regularly every year. A family tradition." She paused then as if to remember one such time and then went on.

"Speaking of the Barrie family members, this girl---," Dr. Salima said, now pointing at Wendy – "bears a resemblance to Mrs. Ogilvy Barrie. She was Jimmy's mother. Jimmy isn't young Jimmy any more so no wonder she isn't among the living, she died many years ago but I saw her photos. Mr. Barrie became famous throughout the whole country after his accident. He's one of the longest surviving coma patients in the world. I read all those articles on him and his family. I saw the photos of them all. But I never saw any photos of Mrs. Ogilvy Barrie from her childhood but the resemblance of her facial features to those of that girl is striking. Facial features look the same for the whole life even if one gets older. If my theory is correct, then we can safely assume that Jimmy's imagination created Wendy on the basis of his own mother. You told me that Wendy is the mother of Peter" – the mentioned boy nodded, smiling – "the same as the woman after whose facial features, Wendy's have been modeled was James' real mother. In other words, all the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle fit. Wendy Darling is young Margaret Ogilvy Barrie and Peter Pan is young James Matthew Barrie."

The silence that fell after her explanations seemed so thick that one could cut it with a knife. The scary suspicion started to sneak into the children's hearts but none of them, even Peter, so bold and perky for his whole life commented on their new friend's words, knowing what it meant if she was right – and deep in their hearts they knew she was. They were able to only look at each other; their glances expressed the sad understanding.

As if reading their minds, Dr. Salima Junaid's next words constituted the confirmation of what they already knew. "Neverland is dying," she started slowly, like she was trying to do her best to hold back from saying the truth. "Because its creator is dying. The end of his life is probably going to be the end of the life of Peter Pan, the boy who is Mr. Barrie's alter ego and the whole rest of you. When I was in my coma I thought that my life in dreamland as Anne was real, as same as you thought yourself to be real children. And a real fairy" – the doctor from the Royal London Hospital smiled at Tinkerbell sitting on Peter's shoulder.

"I recognize you. In the past Jimmy used to have a fairy plush toy on his table, together with the other ones. It had blonde hair and a green dress. The nurses who took care of Barrie reported that from time to time they could feel some weak movements which meant some part of his brain wasn't sleeping. He was partially conscious and although he couldn't communicate with anybody, he certainly somehow knew by some sixth sense about those who surrounded him to use his surroundings as a base for the world in which he lived in his imagination, the same as I lived as someone else in my own head when I was in my coma.

I think that toy was his friend's gift for him; it was everything he could do to redeem his deed from his childhood. That was at least what he claimed. In the eighties he came out with his own version of how the accident had happened and what Jimmy really looked like. All tabloids wrote abuzz about it but he never managed to prove that what he said was true. But I believe him. Why otherwise would anyone ever have wanted to risk his reputation if not in this aim to soothe the qualms of conscience? He said he pushed Jimmy on ice because he mocked his disability. I don't know if that was true but young Barrie was just a child then not a little saint and children often laugh at others' defects. He visits him here from time to time. He lives here in London so what else does he have to do? He told me during his last visit he'd be in here tomorrow. He keeps having dreams on Neverland too, he told me. I often talk to him, he trusts me. He thought those dreams were just ordinary dreams but I know better what it is about. You can meet him the next day. I think he can be trusted… he's a really good man in spite of what he did to his friend when he was eleven. Now he's atoning for this with the pricks of conscience, poor man. I think you should meet him to assure him his childhood friend had a good and interesting life in the world of his imagination although nobody would describe his state as a life of any kind. He deserves it. The same as you deserved the knowledge of what happened and who you really are. The same as my Anne wasn't a real girl, you aren't real either. Regardless of how real you seem to yourself. You are merely patterns, ideas, repeating motifs. You are living embodiments of human imagination, echoes of reality, pure creation of sub consciousness. And even your existence is brief and bounded and it is coming to an end with the death of your creator."


	6. Jimmy's Friend

No one from their small group slept very well that night.

The night after the revelations that they heard from Dr. Junaid in her house situated near the hospital, were very strange. Even if they had a comfortable bed that Dr. Junaid shared with the girls, a couch (on which the twins curled up) and mattresses covered with warm blankets where the rest could sleep, they still had a hard time falling asleep. They were used to Spartan conditions so even if they were to spend this night on the cold floor, they wouldn't have minded as much but in this situation falling asleep seemed one of the most difficult things they would have to deal with. They kept tossing and turning, though the day was very tiring and one could expect that as soon after they pressed their heads into the pillows, they'd fall into the arms of Morpheus. But they didn't and you couldn't blame them on this. How could even the bravest heart not shudder when facing the final curtain? Facing the vision of the ultimate end? The destruction that awaited them?

Dr. Junaid, who proposed to them to call her just by her name – Salima - had a lot to say about the fate that was awaiting them and they had no reason not to believe her that the life of "Jimmy" was getting near its inevitable end. She had seen many patients before and was familiar with the signs. "Jimmy's" body was preparing for its ultimate end but the same thing, as it seemed, was happening also to his mind. Yes, the products of his mind, his fertile imagination where the boy-man was able to create an alternate reality which became an exile of his from the harsh reality of the hospital bed, were dying together with their creator. Salima Junaid warned them that the end of the life of James Barrie could take place practically in any moment – she didn't give them hope the old man would survive more than a couple of weeks… months maybe at best. At the very, very best. They believed their new friend's intuition about this. Didn't she live for some months as someone else having been met with an accident so similar to the one in which young Barrie endured? And what happened to her Anne, her alter ego, when young Salima finally managed to find her way into her world? Anne, the girl living in the past and in another country, in the same way as Barrie's creations lived in a different location and time than he did, vanished without a trace, like a candle in the wind.

This was what Salima didn't need to repeat to them one more time before they went to bed. Salima fell asleep as soon as her head adorned with long, black hair touched the impeccably white pillow – she must have been very tired after her work indeed – but the young exiles from Neverland, as much as they would like to, couldn't follow her example. They were glad they couldn't talk so as not to wake their friend – it gave them a good excuse not to raise the unpleasant issue of Jimmy's failing health, which, though they didn't want to even think about it, kept forcing its way into their minds. It was as if they had an achy tooth, which still hurt, although they didn't dare touch it with the tips of their tongues. This pain can be mild and distant but it is there. Well, this very worry couldn't be called mild or distant though. It was on their minds for the whole night, until the very morning before the dawn, when they managed to fell asleep, as tiredness finally overpowered them.

Now, sitting in the living room of Salima and dressed in the clothes she gave them before she had left for the hospital, they didn't remember this night well. The clothes she told them to wear used to belong to her brother when he was a child. Tiger Lily and Wendy wore clothes Salima herself used to wear when she was their age. Tiger Lily, now devoid of her Indian attire and Wendy Darling, not dressed in her blue Victorian dress any more looked like ordinary little girls, wearing a bit old fashioned but still decent looking skirts and blouses the original owner of whom had grown out of a long time ago. Their male friends also replaced their animal skin clothes by casual shirts and jeans.

Today was the day when they were to meet the mysterious friend of their creator, the one who contributed to their being "born" by his deed of pushing young Jimmy Barrie on the ice. The mysterious man who dreamed about Neverland too. The man thanks to whom they got to live. It was still hard to believe this. All those adventures in Neverland – swimming in the lagoon before it turned into disgusting mud, fighting pirates (who were just a memory of Jimmy's pirate ship in the bottle turned real by the power of his imagination) and visiting fairies (mere plush toys) – were made up. Pleasant and wonderful – but not real. Being just a result of a boy's misdeed from many years before. They didn't know if they should be grateful to him for this or not. Yet, thanks to him they could taste life but if they weren't alive, they wouldn't have to face the danger of annihilation now. But… on the other hand, they at least had his chance to come to exist. Is it better to exist, even if for a short moment, or not exist at all?

Salima left in the morning after she had made breakfast for them, to prepare Mr. Barrie's friend for the meeting. She felt – and the Neverlanders agreed with her on this – that she owed him this. The old man, tormented with qualms of conscience, deserved the truth about his childhood friend's cheerful life spent in this magic land which was known by its inhabitants as Neverland. Salima knew he'd easily believe her – he had those dreams. He was an old man getting near the end of his life, in a similar way as Jimmy. He deserved the truth.

When Salima left, the children and their fairy friend which used to be a mere plushie sitting on the table in Jimmy's hospital room, started to explore the house. It was not a big house and for such a large group it seemed even smaller. But it was fascinating. Neither the Darlings nor their Neverland friends had ever seen anything like it. Before she had left the house, Dr. Junaid about some of the things that she owned and now the inquisitive bunch set about to explore them. The computer. The TV set. The mp3 player lying on the desk. They watched TV for a short time, surprised at the images they saw. England had a new queen now; she was an elderly woman, named Elizabeth. They roamed the rooms of the house, as Salima told them not to come out. But something was wrong. They didn't know if it was the result of the sleepless night or some new, ghastly symptom indicating that their creator lying in his hospital bed got worse. Or even… No, it couldn't be it; they were just getting weaker all of a sudden and their sense of reality was failing. They felt like sleeping; a strange feeling which seemed to have little to do with normal sleep. A strange feeling which was especially felt by John, Nibs and Peter, who complained the most. The rest didn't feel much better. Drowsy and tired in a strange way, they waited for Salima.

They didn't need to wait for too long. Barrie's friend lived quite close and although Dr. Junaid didn't have the magic pixie dust which would allow to fly to him, saving a lot of time, she didn't spent too much time out. Soon, the children heard the sound of a key in the lock and they hurried as fast as they could despite their drowsy state to see her and meet the man who was partially responsible for their creation.

Dr. Junaid was taking her coat off to hang it on the hook on the wall. Behind her, there was the man she was going to introduce to her new young friends. A tall, thin man with grey hair and angular features. Having heard the voices of the children coming out of the room, he raised his head to take a look at the owners of them as they crowded into the hall. Then, their glances met. The children's faces reflected for a moment some strange mixture of feelings – surprise, curiosity, sudden recognition as they all shouted in unison.

"Hook!"


	7. James Stuart's Story

It was two days later and while back then the trend of events still showed itself relatively well. Now, if they were much more naïve than they really were, they wouldn't be able to deceive themselves any more that things had had a change to take a decided turn on their account. The sad reminder of that their time was running out was some of their companions lying in Salima's bed and on her couch in another room, stricken with this strange weakness. Salima took care of them, as she did with her patients, though she obviously never had encountered a patient with being ill with something so strange. In spite of this, she tenderly cared for Nibs, John, Peter, little Michael and Tiger Lily, with whose health she was most concerned – Tiger Lily, after all, was in some sense, herself, made almost thirty years younger.

Tinkerbell was also ill. She didn't turn into the plush toy that she previously was until the imagination of a boy-man spending his whole long life in bed made her from a toy on his nightstand into a living fairy, but she became as ill as well as her companions. She lay in a small toy bed in which, so many years ago, Salima's doll used to lay, covered with a toy quilt. Salima took it from the attic where she kept the toys she played with as a child, no older than this unusual group whose members were her guests now.

The ill weren't coughing, sneezing or complaining of a headache but their state of health was obviously bad. They couldn't be cured with syrups, pills or injections as it would be possible in the case of an ordinary health ailment – they were just lying weak and pale, apathetic and indifferent to anything, as if their life was pouring out of them, drop by drop. They lay like Jimmy lay for his whole life since the fateful accident back in his late childhood, when he first began to conjure Neverland into existence. Neverland-The powerful illusion, so realistic that it managed to deceive all of them. A mere illusion, a creation from the mind of someone else. Someone who was subconsciously longing to leave his bed and play like the boy he was.

Ah, Jimmy. Jimmy Barrie. Or rather James since he was a grown man now. There was also this other man of the same name now: James Hook. It was at least the name of this man whose face with sudden shock they recognized in the elderly gentleman who accompanied Dr. Junaid when she returned home with him. Though old and wearing the clothes from this place and time, so unlike the usual pirate attire Hook used to wear on board his ship, he was Hook, there was no doubt about that. He bore a close resemblance to their arch enemy. James Barrie's friend was an old version of Hook, the same as Peter Pan was a much younger version of Barrie himself. And later, when they lowered their eyes to the newcomer's sleeve from which no hand appeared, they didn't have any more doubts as to after whom Captain Hook was modeled by Mr. Barrie's sleeping mind. Of course, he could be someone else in this world, in London 2010, but they knew it was him, this man whom they were always fighting.

Shivering with impatient anticipation, they couldn't wait for Salima Junaid to lead him into the room, and for this man to whom they couldn't break their distrust, to start speaking. They wanted to know the whole story coming from his own mouth, as it was.

Salima had said he deserved the truth, anyway. But what about themselves? Was there anything else for them than simply waiting for their inevitable end? For the end of their unreal life? It was Jimmy who was real; they lived only a poor man's version of reality. So they sat and waited to hear the story of the elderly man with no hand. He was just as surprised by their being there as they were but Salima must have enlightened him on who he was going to see in her house; he accepted the truth very easy. He remembered the children from his dreams he shared with her and as such, recognized them easily. Hence his reaction was different than Salima's – he knew what to expect.

His story didn't hide any secrets from them. In fact, it was just what the children already knew from the clippings hanging on the wall of Jimmy's hospital room. They subconsciously expected that there was some mystery that the clippings hadn't revealed but no, Mr. James's (James Hook's; they were used to thinking of him like that) story was basically just a repetition of what they already knew, with an addition of some details he shared with them.

James, being then barely a young Jimmy, just like his friend, went with his other friend, Bobby Smee (another name the listeners smiled at, recognizing it all of a sudden) to the skating rink where they met Jimmy Barrie. And after a short conversation they started to quarrel. Jimmy Barrie got angry at him and called him a pathetic cripple with no hand, like a pirate – the other Jimmy was born with a physical defect, in the place where there should be his hand, there was nothing, though this Jimmy didn't ever hit upon an idea to attach a hook to his wrist, unlike his Neverland counterpart – and then the insulted boy pushed young Barrie onto the ice. Barrie fell, hitting his head and when Jimmy and Bobby's efforts weren't enough to revive him, they called their parents. He told them that their friend just fallen, he never admitted the truth until the 80's when, tormented with the qualms of conscience decided to go to a newspaper to tell how it had really happened. But even then there were not many who would want to believe him, suspecting him of merely wanting to get famous too.

Now he was telling this story for the second time, feeling that he at least partially – although the situation of Barrie wasn't changed by it – redeemed by admitting the whole truth.

First to the newspaper, and now to the children he remembered from his dreams. Dreams in which he was a pirate, he remembered particularly well. And he found it very strange, as he had never imagined himself as a pirate or any other kind of evildoer for that matter. Though, he admitted with embitterment, James Matthew Barrie surely perceived him in his sleeping mind as a villain so that that part was handed in to him. Some of the other boys he had known in his childhood (many were long dead by now) had appeared in their adult versions on board the pirate ship along with him. For instance, Bobby Smee was already dead; this short and silly boy had time to grow up into a man who in turn died of old age last year. The other childhood friends - Eddie Smith, Charlie Murray, Joe Harris, Johnny Winfrey – all of them, regardless of if they were still alive or not, lived as pirates in James Barrie's imagination. In this fabulous fantasy, they were all there.

After having finished his story, James Stuart (who liked to refer to himself as James Hook, because of his inborn defect) was now quite glad that he was found trustworthy enough to be let in on the secret of his friend's fantasy realm. And he no longer regretted what he did as much as he was now aware that his sleeping friend, who shared his name, despite his anger from so many years before had lived a fabulous and magnificent life having adventures as the young boy standing now before him – Peter Pan. Not many people would actually be able to believe the famous sleeping patient had lived any other kind of life than the one he led in his hospital bed – no one in fact but for Dr. Junaid – but he knew that what he did, had its light side as well.

But James Barrie's life was in danger now. He was getting near his end and it was for the reason – because what else could it be?-why the state of health of some of the Neverlanders was steadily worsening. There was a link between the condition of them and the one of James Barrie. Dr. Junaid didn't hide from them that the most famous patient in the whole country was slowly dying. She didn't give them a detailed description of the medical procedures she and her team had made James undergo – like resuscitation – she didn't want to frighten them too much, but she spent the last two days taking care of Jimmy. That was why she was absent now, leaving the children at home alone.

Although Salma didn't hide from them the strange phenomena that were taking place in the hospital. In Jimmy's room to be more precise over the last two days. The temperature in the old man's room was getting colder as it did previously. Nurse Natalie, the one who called herself Iridessa after the change which took over her mind, still was in the mental health ward of the hospital but her behavior changed – she didn't claim she was someone else any more. She just sank into some sort of catatonia, oblivious to what was happening around her.

This was the news Salima shared with the Neverland exiles. The ill were lying in beds but those who managed to remain healthy, were sitting apathetically on the floor in the living room of Salima's house which was covered with a thick fluffy green carpet. It resembled the grass in Neverland which they had had to leave so in such a strange and unexpected way. Their eyes were fixed on the carpet when the door to the living room suddenly opened and Salima's face showed itself in the opening. She was in the hospital taking care of Jimmy for the whole day but now, unheard by the children, she had come back home. On her face there was a strange look which they couldn't identify until they stared at her for a few moments before they realized what it was: excitement. Or at least, that was what filled her voice when she opened her mouth and cried to them, "Come with me, something unusual is happening!"


	8. New Identity

One glance at Salima's face where excitement was blooming, told them that something unusual was happening. And that it probably wasn't anything bad, despite the worsening state of their creator. The grain of new hope that perhaps not everything was lost was soon sown into their hearts at their friend's words. She came to them in hurry, with her beautiful black hair flowing behind her, so similar to the one of her younger counterpart created by the sleeping mind of Mr. Barrie. Although unlike her, she didn't plait it into two braids, but left it tangled, as if the woman didn't have enough time to comb it or as if she tousled as a means to vent her frustration in dealing with some difficult problem. Any attentive observer would notice that the pretty dark face of the Pakistani doctor had this same expression that appears on the faces of people who have just came across something far beyond their usual experiences. Either it is something scary or really positive but which was the case now? It was time for the Neverland exiles to find out what emotions hid behind the excitement in Salima's voice.

They were walking as fast as they could towards the hospital now, led by Dr. Junaid, even though it was quite close to her home. Despite their pace, they had enough time to take a look at the world which was stretching out before their amazed eyes such as the cars and the strange clothes that were in fashion now.

Slightly, the twins, Cubby, Tootles and Wendy brought up the rear of the procession, so that the boys were in some sense between their two "mothers". None of them ever knew their real mothers so they clang to the closest females willing to act as ones. To Wendy who wasn't much older than they, actually much too young to be anybody's real mother, had taken the maternal role on after she was swept away from London. And to Dr. Junaid who was the basis of their other female friend, the now ill Tiger Lily, was created.

They didn't need to change their animal skin clothes because they already had replaced them with the clothes that used to belong to Salima's brother. They knew that a group of children dressed in animal skins would make a strange impression on the people from the hospital who had seen them, Salima didn't need to tell them this. Since they looked perfectly normal, their behavior had to be normal and not raising any suspicion as well. During the walk to the hospital, their "mothers" had explained to the boys from Neverland how they should behave while in the hospital and what they should say to any person who happened to talk with them.

They were to pretend Mr. Barrie's young relatives, wanting to see their dying great great uncle one more time before his passing. Luckily there weren't too many of them – the rest were lying in beds - so the children could pretend to be a group of siblings so in this sense, the more proper name for their "great great uncle" of this degree of consanguinity seemed to be "father". Mainly, due to their companions' "illness" the group was reduced to just six children – Slightly, the twins, Cubby, Tootles and Wendy. And it was a good thing that such big families weren't anything suspicious. Maybe they weren't as often as in Wendy's time (though that wasn't the time from which Mr. Barrie came from; he was born two decades later but for some reason his sleeping mind came to the conclusion that the time of the early 20th century suited his tastes more than more modern times) but the hospital workers wouldn't be very surprised having seen this group, as they would have been if they had seen all of the children who had arrived from the dying Neverland. Wendy had offered she could stay with their ill friends but Salima had already informed Mr. James Stuart who also lived near the hospital that she were to take the children who had managed to stay healthy to see Jimmy so it was he who would stay with them.

Salima told the diminished group of six children about her plan. If asked by anyone – and it would happen for sure, as she told her workmates that she would bring them – they were to make themselves out to be Mr. Barrie's family members. They were to tell that they were left with Miss Junaid by their parents who were friends with her. She even invented new names for them – but for Wendy who was very surprised that her name, so unique in 1904, the year from which she was taken by Peter Pan was now relatively popular. But the rest of the children had to stick to the names Salima proposed to them. Their own names, given to them by Peter when he found them, weren't ordinary names. They weren't even names at all. Slightly? But slightly what? Cubby? Why is this boy named like a small secluded room? Tootles? No, they had to have new names they could use if they had to introduce themselves to Salima's workmates. New names and new ages since none of them knew their own age as the time in Neverland passed differently than the real world. In this way the twins got the names Johnny and Dave and their age regardless of how old they could be, from now on were nine. They at least looked around this age – nine or ten, just a bit younger than Wendy who was eleven, the same as Jimmy when he had had his accident.

Slightly, who didn't know his age either but was to claim from now on, if asked, that he was ten and his name was Kevin. Cubby was eight and his name – in the version delivered by Salima – was now Chris. Tootles, the youngest one was a boy of six and was not named Tootles any more – he was to be known under the name of Mike. Such precautions were making them believable in the eyes of the doctors taking care of James Barrie. Typically children weren't allowed to visit so ill patients but this time an exception was made due to who the patient they were to visit was.

Salima didn't want to tell them what was happening, only telling them that they "would see it themselves" so they had to believe her. They would see it when they were left with their relative to tell him their last farewell. Salima settled it with the doctors. But what was her aim?

Salima Junaid spent many an hour at the feet of the simple, white colored hospital bed, looking at the sleeping man, wondering if he too was leading any sort of mental life in the world conjured up by his own imagination, like she did, so many years ago, when she was hit on the head. Being born many years after his accident, when he was already an adult man, old enough to be her grandparent she couldn't remember his being a patient of their hospital from the very beginning but she often wondered if he too could develop his secret life inside his own head as she did so many years ago. She remembered it very well, however for many years she never uttered a word about it to anybody. Not even Dr Kimball, her good friend from the hospital, who though shared the dreams about his being a little boy on a distant magical island with her. Not even now. The only person with whom the woman shared the whole truth about the Lost Boys was Mr. Stuart, the elderly man sharing the same first name and the same fate with Jimmy.

Even if he had lived an ordinary life while James Barrie slept his whole life, creating his alter ego – a young boy who could spend his whole life on pleasures unlike his alternative version confined to bed, their fates were intertwined. He deserved the truth, being an old man now, like Jimmy who never really became James. And who was now dying – even if his death wasn't going to take place very soon, like in a couple of days, he was dying in his hospital room. That's why all those mysterious phenomena had started to happen. Nurses would be afraid to enter his room but Salima wasn't. During the last two days she spent in Barrie's room, she was a witness to some phenomena she was now going to show to the Neverland exiles.

The fog portal.

Just like the one through which her little friends had arrived into her world. The hypno-portals. She had to turn her eyes back to avoid getting sucked into one. The woman had a feeling she had to enter the portal, as if something was calling her name, deep inside her mind, persuading her into coming through the strange blue fog. She managed to overcome this feeling, as hard as it was but she did it, yes – but not before she turned her eyes back, avoiding in this way getting sucked into the portal, she looked at it. And saw something inside it. Something which she didn't expect to see.

And now she was going to show it to the Neverland children.


	9. Through the Portal One More Time

Doctor Salima, as said, had spent a lot of time at the feet of the simple, white painted bed, in which once the most famous British patient lay, following the small movements of his lean chest with her dark eyes. She remembered her experiences from childhood and wondered if the man from the bed in front of her also managed to create a similar world in her head. Every time she dealt with a patient who woke up from a coma, she asked them about their feelings from the time they were in this very state. And she was disappointed when the sole reply she got was: "well, I knew that my family was near me, I couldn't tell them anything but I certainly herd their voices". This was a known phenomenon – comatose patients were often capable of realizing the presence of the people around them, if only they weren't sunk in the coma deep but no one she had to do with – not that there were that many of them – reported a vision of the world conjured up by their very imagination. They could be only embarrassed to talk about similar things but later, when Salima signed up on the Internet medical boards (and to be honest, there were also some boards devoted to the paranormal, found among them), she didn't find almost any mentions which would confirm her belief that every comatose patient creates a world in their own head, to soothe the solitude they experience trapped under the dome of their own skull, having just their thoughts as the sole company.

Or maybe it was all about time you spent in a coma. Maybe the fantasy needed time to be able to develop and a mere few days or even weeks wasn't enough. If it was true, then the man known under the name of James Matthew Barrie had a lot of time for this, condemned eternally to the solitude of the white room the silence of which was broken only by the sounds uttered by the machines to which he was attached.

These were the memories floating in the doctor's head when she was making her way to her home, after the revelation she experienced, to share it with the Neverland young exiles. She wasn't going to tell them about what she saw in the portal connecting both the worlds and about the knowledge that out of a sudden flew down on her – they had to see it on their own. Salima blessed her curiosity that made her ponder the possibility of different worlds existing in other people's heads, which in some circumstances, could turn real. If not this curiosity, she wouldn't have been in the room taken by Barrie then, when she saw the portal opening. She had already finished her work then and was to go but decided to spend some minutes in there more, when it opened before her eyes. And then… something like… opened in her own head too, like she got a new, different awareness of what was happening. She was going to show it to the Lost children now

The aforementioned were now climbing the steps of the stairs leading to the hospital. Only this small distance was separating the from the truth the white room kept. Only three steps more, now the two… now only one step – and they were already in, craning their necks tanned by the Neverland sun to catch a look of the inside of the building. Salima took the precautions, making the new personalities for them in the case someone of the hospital staff was going to start a conversation with them on their family they knew from the every year gatherings in their relative's room, but it seemed that, at least for now, nobody disturbed them. They were taking fast steps on the floor of the hospital, passing by the other patients and nurses, to get to the room as fast as possible. The apathetic gaze of them swept the children for a short moment but it was all. They covered the distance of the next meters of the floor, the next stairs – and they were before the door of the room taken by Mr. Barrie.

Wendy reached her hand out and turned the knob. The door opened with a soft noise. They entered the room, once more taking a look at the man lying in the bed. The doctor pulled the key from the pocket of her frock and closed the door. They had to be alone and any company wasn't something they needed at that time. A company could only destroy everything.

The sight before them didn't change, like eternally frozen in time. There were fresh flowers in a vase standing on one of the tables – the one standing near the bed – and someone changed James Barrie's faded blue pajamas for the new ones, dark grey with big buttons but aside from this, all looked just as same as before. And as before, the only movement and sound in the room were those of the chest of Jimmy moving up and down thanks to the life support machine and the utterance of the machine. The freshly shaved face of the man was peaceful. Everything looked normal. There were no sign of manifestations of the shreds of memory of the dying man, which now, at the last weeks of his life, were materializing, manifesting in the physical form. No cold air, no ice statues, no items bringing associations of the winter when Jimmy's life changed, like the gloves which out of a sudden appeared in the Mermaid Lagoon in Neverland. Did it still exist? Probably not and if they stayed in there, they would be destroyed by the forces destroying it as well, not solving the mystery of their creator, at whom they were looking now in silent fascination, wondering what sort of mystery this sleeping body could hide, like a shell hiding a pearl the existence of which you can't guess until you open it.

It was time for the answer. The children's eyes directed towards Salima's face. The woman understood this silent question. She licked her lips painted with a ruby lipstick which was already almost gone and opened her mouth. She was speaking for the next five minutes and when she finished, the children knew there was one lawyer to this amazing story they became a part of which more than they could ever expect.

Salima reconciled herself to the fate awaiting her young friends. She liked them though she didn't know them for long. Jimmy was to fall in the arms of death soon and they were to follow him. She only didn't know how it would look like. Being a doctor, she was familiar with death and how it looked like in ordinary people but the children she knew weren't mere mortals. She had no idea if they were to just vanish in the thin air, like the flames of candles in the wind, sink into a coma like their "father" did or just die like real people. If this last scenario was to confirm, she would have to deal with a duty of doing something with the bodies. She would also have to explain people that it wasn't she who killed them. And who they were - because the research would prove the children weren't certainly the family members of Mr. James Barrie in any way. Salima didn't share those fears with the children who even didn't devote any thought to this duty she would be left with if they died – they were just children, not paying too much attention to this less pleasant and more prosaic side of life – but now, after what she saw in the room, she came to think the rescue did exist in spite of everything.

It was the portal made of bluish mist, mysterious like all portals that lead to unknown worlds but having in this very case one mystery more. During Salima's fight to get rid of the feeling seeping into her brain that she should enter the gate to Neverland opening before her when she suddenly saw this image coming out of the portal. And this knowledge which filled her head added to it, making her at one moment realize everything. This sudden outburst of knowledge in her mind didn't resemble telepathy as she had imagined it to be. It was just prosaic knowledge – like the one that there comes summer after spring, that one can die of a heart attack, that she had a brother who lived in Liverpool as a businessman, so down to earth that if it was he instead of her who witnessed all those events, he would go to the closest psychiatric clinique asking for locking him up because he got crazy (Salima wouldn't be surprised if it turned out Jimmy based Wendy's devoid of imagination father on him). But in spite of its being so ordinary, it was shocking enough for her. And the bigger shock was who this voice delivering her all this knowledge on what was happening belonged to. And the biggest shock out of all, was for her the extent of power this person had over the portals and everything.

" So he told me to take you all in here because he can control the portals." – finished Salima, smiling a smile which for a moment made her look younger, almost as if she wasn't much older than the children who were surrounding her and the only reason for which on the faces of whom no look of shock was not reflecting, was that they were already too used to all those strange situations at the center of which they found themselves. They already got too indifferent to them to express the feelings they held, as intensive as they were.

"And it means we'll be able to go to Neverland through one"? – asked Tootles.

"Yes. We have to wait for the opening of it. It won't last long".

They sat on the floor, waiting, all but for Cubby who, unable to stand the pressure of the expectation, came to the window, drawing the blue curtains out to take a look of the world beyond the hospital.

"Look, the portal is opening" – whispered Salima, pointing at the phenomenon starting before their eyes. The mist was twirling between the bed of Jimmy and the window, twitching slightly. It was the size of a door, maybe a bit bigger. But when they stood up to enter the portal, already starting to feel the call which made them come through it, when someone knocked the door and a male voice was heard:

"Salima? Are you there?"

"it's doctor Kimball" – whispered the aforementioned in a silent voice. That was good they closed the door indeed. No one could disturb them at this very moment. Oblivious to the knocking and to anything, silently, one by one, they slid through the portal which twirled for a moment after the last of them – Slightly – came through it, only to disperse in the air. They came through the portal to face the ultimate answer for all of their questions and problems delivered to them by the man who contacted Salima in such an unusual way. By James Matthew Barrie.


	10. Mr Barrie Once More

**The reference to a wizard boy who was raised to the status of a film star and was later kidnapped by a very rich man who wanted him to replace his son comes from Kajtuś the Wizard – a very good Polish novel from the 30's by Janusz Korczak, now a bit forgotten but according to Wikipedia, almost comparable back then in terms of popularity to the Harry Potter series. It was translated into English.**

They walked through the swirling mist once more and into the corridor that connected the two worlds. If Dr. Kimball could open the door, then he would catch the sight of the children and his friend disappearing into the bluish fog which was (for obvious reasons) very out of place in the hospital.

The last shreds of the portal swirled in the air before it finally closed, as if the immaterial portal couldn't stand the touch of the atmosphere of this world. It closed a moment after the last person – Slightly – entered it, swallowing them all in the blissful oblivion.

And when it opened for the second time and spat them out, it was no hospital room that they found themselves in but luxuriant greenery. The sun rays, golden and warm were falling on them from the blue picturesque sky which was speckled with white, fluffy clouds. The dark silhouette of a wood loomed up so close to the newcomers to this new world, the cheerful chirping of birds could be heard. The air smelled of summer and flowers which were in full bloom. In other words, this new world looked pretty much like the Neverland that they knew and loved.

But there was one difference. In Neverland there were no old people sitting in armchairs with mysterious smiles on their faces as they looked at the children. Unlike the man who did, at the moment. They didn't see him at first, too concentrated on observing the world they had just arrived in, silently comparing it to the land they come from. Until Salima turned back and out of her mouth a soft "oh" came out. Her companions followed with their gaze to the sight that made her say this and this is how they became aware of the fact that they weren't alone in this new land.

The old man sitting in his armchair which seemed just as out of place in this new world as the portal was in the hospital room, seemed to be completely relaxed, as if he was for many years perfectly familiar with this so Neverland like place, unlike the children. Or weren't they? Though the land of their origin was destroyed, so they came to believe at least, at the sight of their companion the new hope that it wasn't lost yet started to pour into their hearts. They didn't have any reason before to believe it could survive but one glance at the man changed everything.

The face of the elderly gentleman, dressed in elegant clothes from the time period that Wendy came from, sitting in his elegant armchair with its carved mahogany arms, belonged to someone they knew very well – though not in this very form. They had seen the man's face in the ice statue that had appeared in their underground house what seemed like a million years ago. They had seen his face in the face of their leader who stayed in Salima's home and finally, in the old man who had slept his whole life only to dream them in his fantastic dreams and make them come to life in the physical form.

There are moments in life when all one is capable of doing is freeze in shock, unable to do anything else than repeat in their mind, "It can't be, it just can't be". They stood like that for maybe ten seconds, not saying anything because anything which could come out of their mouths would be just mumbling; rugged shreds of words limited to unintelligent: "how?", "what?" and "but we thought that…". No one said anything until Salima, adult and rational, however not any less shocked than the children shook off the stupor and slowly approached the man in the armchair. She reached her hand out standing in front of the armchair, waiting for any sign from the man that he was not a ghost but a real person of flesh and blood. The elderly gentleman, not stopping to smile, reached out his hand, which was covered with an expensive material of the dark suit he was wearing towards the woman and touched her hand.

Their fingers touched. The man's hand was warm; it belonged to a real person indeed. His smile widened.

"You helped them find the way to Neverland, Ms. Junaid," he said in a pleasant warm voice from which a note of kindness resonated. The man who looked like James Matthew Barrie – wait, he _was_ James Barrie indeed, though looking much different than they all were used to, seemed the embodiment of majesty when he was sitting there in his armchair with its mahogany arms, like some baronet rather than a man who spent his whole life in bed. Through his face with its regular features the wisdom and the glow of subtle brittle beauty of an old age was shining, endowing the man with the aura of royalty – not the one of blood but the one that comes from a brilliant mind and a noble soul.

"This is Neverland?" asked Wendy. The thought that this new beautiful land though so similar to the destroyed Neverland she and her brothers had come to love after they were taken from London, could actually be it, was almost hilarious. Almost as much as this man being the same person as the one lying in bed like an amazingly realistic looking figure made of wax. But on the other hand, the armchair man _was_ the same person as him so it meant that this new land…?

The answer that followed was short but not simple.

"Yes, the place in which you are is Neverland. Or maybe rather, it's _Neverland_." The man pronounced this last word stressing it. He would have dwelled on it more but at the same moment Salima interrupted him."How are you here? Are you the real Mr. James Barrie? How can it be that you are here and at the same time lie in bed in the hospital?"

"Wait, my dear." chuckled the man. "Let me finish. I would love to explain everything to you all. It is a long and complicated story so it will be better if you sit down. The story of myself and Neverland isn't something you can listen to while standing and not feeling any tiredness in your legs afterwards. Sit down and please, allow me to tell you my story."

The little group was too excited to even think about standing in one place throughout the whole story without wriggling, let alone sitting. But obediently they sat down in the thick, emerald green grass, listening to the distant chirrup of the birds flying far above their heads. They sat and started to listen; enraptured by the magic of Mr. Barrie's melodic voice and the story he had for them.

"I was only eleven when my life changed," Mr. Barrie began, not looking at the small group gathered before him and pricking up their ears so as not to drop any word coming out of his mouth. Instead, he lowered his head, as if looking inside himself and experiencing the experiences he was talking about one more time.

"My friend who was also named James and eleven like myself pushed me and I fell through the ice. This is what you already know. In a moment I am going to tell you how I can know of this when you that I was laying in a hospital bed the entire time.

"Now let me come back to the very root of my story. I have lain in bed since I was a child. I am not sure when I became aware of what was happening to me but it must have been soon after the accident. I was able to know exquisitely well of everything that was happening to me. I mean, forgive me to my body. There is a difference. I am not sure at what point it was that I created Neverland and its inhabitants either. I was a child when I had this accident and in some way I remained a child because I never experienced anything other than my childhood. I remembered everything from my life before the accident and I wanted to live a different life than the one led in bed. I wanted to play and have fun like my peers. I imagined I lived in a land of magic where I could do anything I wished.

"The shape of this particular fantasy changed several times. These were different worlds. For a short time I lived in the medieval times as a young prince only to decide on becoming – in my imagination – a wizard boy discovering his powers and running away from home to have millions of adventures - I became a film star in Hollywood, later I was kidnapped by a millionaire whose own son and wife had died and who wanted to make me his son. After I got bored with this fantasy, I decided on choosing something new. It must be something original, not based on reality. I decided on an island where I could do anything I wanted. I named it Neverland. I imagined I was a boy who could do everything I couldn't – play and have fun. I named my alter ego Peter Pan. Peter because I liked this name, I got bored with my real name so I decided on a new one. Pan comes from a Greek myth. It was the name of a god who lived in forests far from any other people. But I didn't live far from them. I imagined there were also other children with whom I could play. Over the course of years this fantasy developed and changed, some of the children were replaced by different ones, based on the people I knew. Like the people from the hospital and some of them were my own family members. Or the children I had known before the accident, like the Llewelyn - Davies boys. There were five of them: George, Jack, Peter, Michael and Nicholas. I liked to play with them.

"The same was true for the other people who lived on the island. I liked pirate and Indian stories so I decided my island must have those inhabitants too. I gave them the faces of the people I knew. The ship of the pirates was based on one I had of a ship in a bottle that sat in my hospital room.

"And there were fairies. Let's not forget about the fairies. I liked stories about magical creatures as well. I added them to my Neverland. I had many fairy plush toys in my hospital room. I remember their being brought to me though nobody could guess I was aware of it. I created some fairies in my land on the basis of them and on the basis of the people I knew as well. The same about mermaids. I remember some distant relative of mine, Ardelia. She was a ginger headed teen who was always very virulent. She was six years older than me and is probably dead by now. But I created the mermaids in Neverland using Ardelia and her friends. She had a circle of close friends with whom she used to gossip with. June, Lucille, Agnes, Mary and Annie. I remember their names well. They were very like Ardelia – pretty, shallow-minded and capricious. I never liked them, so the mermaids from my land were given their qualities. Though I do admit, on the other hand, that my alter ego always knew how to get along with them by flattering them – something I never managed to do with the real girls.

"Now as for the way to get to Neverland – second star to the right – in turn comes from the two stars I observed as a child from the window of my bedroom. There were two stars which every night shone above the tops of the trees growing behind our house. My alter ego could fly because I always perceived this ability very useful. It gave me the freedom I didn't have lying in bed. I spent a lot of time in this fantasy, stealing the shreds of reality I knew from the times before the accident to incorporate them into it.

"Over the course of time I saw something strange. The land which I created became somehow real. It wasn't like a mere fantasy because I could really enter it. But not as Peter Pan. I came to the conclusion that this boy, the same as his friends and enemies had their own lives, were becoming real. I couldn't control this aspect of myself to which I gave life as to Peter. I could observe everything though, as pure thought. I could say I became a spirit of this land; a benign bodiless spirit who could come to this world to observe but unable to change anything. I couldn't make Peter not cut Hook's hand off although I did find this deed of him cruel and disgusting. You know Hook was modeled after the boy who pushed me on the skating pond then. He had no hand – an inborn defect. James Hook in my world lost his hand as well at the hands of my alter ego. I subconsciously wanted to punish him for what he done to me and this fragment of myself who was Peter answered this. I told you that I was someone like a spirit of the island but there were more of them, as it seemed. The people who were in a coma long enough to be capable of making the worlds of their own creation to soothe their loneliness. They didn't spend as much time in this vegetative state as myself and when they eventually awoke, the worlds created by them disappeared. Their worlds were afflicted by disasters like my Neverland and finally, they vanished into oblivion. Their inhabitants sometimes died together with them and sometimes only changed their form, becoming someone else. I and the others could share one mind, exchanging thoughts. This is how I know all of this. My physical body will die soon but my mind will always stay in the astral worlds created by the imaginations of myself and the others like me. I feel their presence in here. This is the world we are in which doesn't exist in reality but I shaped it on the basis of the destroyed Neverland. I liked this world of mine. Beautiful summer weather unlike the winter when all of this started, for the whole year. When my body started to die, it changed, starting to resemble this winter. When I die, I will remain here forever, like the ones who were in a similar situation as me and died while in a coma which had first released their hidden powers.

"Yes, imagination is a very powerful power, much more than I dared to think when I was a boy who was always making up invented stories. The story of Neverland was the greatest I ever came up with. It was the start of a new, wonderful adventure I never thought I would have. To live this sort of dream life was an awfully big adventure. I don't have a grudge against my friend for what he did to me. It's all thanks to him and I should be rather grateful to him. Who, after all said that real life is always better than the dream one? I know I will die soon and you, the shreds of my imagination will die with me too. But not completely. You will most likely just change your form, in the same way as your predecessors in Neverland did, when I incorporated the qualities of the people I came to know later into them, creating you in this manner. I constantly reshaped the original inhabitants of Neverland who were the members of my band I led as Peter Pan. They were often based originally on other people but later on I made them someone else. You didn't even realize this, thinking you were the same from the very beginning. It didn't hurt you, just changed you, making you become a bit different. Like Tiger Lily. I know she had to stay at home. Yes, since you left Neverland, my worsening state of health influences you. Some of you more, some of you less. Tiger Lily was originally based on a painting of an Indian girl I once saw. Later, when Dr. Salima started to take care of me, the image of Tiger Lily changed, being more created on her. Michael Darling was in turn based initially on Nicholas Llewelyn – Davies, my childhood friends' youngest brother, later becoming based more on my relative – my sister Maggie's great grandson. Almost all my relatives got their roles in this fabulous play I named Neverland. Sometimes very small but still. For example my other sister, Isabella, lived on the pirate ship, together with the rest of the pirates. It was a very small role for her indeed and I myself often forgot about her existence in there – she played the role of their cook and seamstress – but she was in there. You may even didn't pay any attention that there was any woman on the ship.

"Or for another example, the twins. You were different when I invented you. Now you look the same but I imagined you to be your opposites like Flip and Flap from the movies. They were popular when I was a child. It was in the thirties but I always found the earlier times more interesting. My mother was telling me stories on how it looked like when she was young. She was already forty when I came into the world. She was born in 1884. You, Wendy, come from 1904, from the time she was twenty, I chose this year to put you and your brothers in because my mother was a young girl then. 1904 somehow fit my taste much better than the thirties. You are one of those who were the same since I started to spin this fantasy. I always wanted you to be an equivalent of my mother whom I loved deeply, only more beautiful. Your features are more delicate than when she was of your age. I wanted my new mother for my Peter Pan to be as beautiful as possible. Even this blue dress you were dressed in when you were taken from your world is based one that actually existed. My mother saw such a dress once in a store but she couldn't afford to buy it. I always thought that my imagined mother should have something my real mother wanted. I remember that day well – mom took me and my brother David with her to that store. David was her favorite son. He later became a children's books writer.

"But now your life is coming near its end. Or at least the life in the shape you know. Let me stress it one more time. I'm not sure what the difference will be like. But to be honest, I guess I may know it. Before my physical body started to die, I started to think about something, about a different world in which Peter and his companions could play. A forest… animals… a bear was always my favorite sort of animal… But I always liked also those more exotic ones – kangaroos, tigers… No, don't pay attention to me at this very moment, I am just thinking aloud. And now please, I don't want to be impolite but come to the portal. I know you would like to ask me questions but please, come back to the real world. I can control the portals between the worlds but I can do it only for a short period of time. Maybe we will be able to meet each other again here... if my body doesn't die before that time, and then I will explain to you anything more you would like to ask me about but now you must go. There is something bad happening with my body and you have to go."

With those words, being such an unexpected ending for the whole story which had hypnotized the listeners, the man raised his hand. A fog cloud started to form, creating a well known portal like the one they had entered this strange new Neverland. They didn't want to enter it, wishing to be able to ask so many questions to Mr. Barrie, disappointed with his finishing his story so sharp and so suddenly but they had to go, answering the call of the hypnotic portal.

As soon as they did, they forgot about their disappointment and fear. For what could be happening with Barrie's body that it made him go so fast, as their minds were dominated by this feeling they had to come into the fog. It was all that mattered at this very moment. They had to come back. Like the crowd of the hypnotized children of the rat catcher from Hameln, with their eyes and minds blank, they came through the wall of blue mist.


	11. Barrie's Health Gets Worse

**Elaine Esposito was a real person; one who beat the record as the one longest staying in a coma.**

Although they didn't realize how lucky they were that they managed to come back, it was good that they had left the place created by Mr. Barrie's imagination. Regardless of how much they wished to spend more in the new Neverland, asking additional questions to Barrie. James Barrie would've answered all of them by patiently explaining to the figments of his imagination everything they wished to know save for the one small problem of their impending fate.

He realized that their fate would be decided very soon and as such, Miss Junaid and the Neverlanders had to leave that place instantly if they weren't going to be trapped there forever. Mr. Barrie's body had begun to die. He knew something was wrong with it, aware of its worsening condition in the same way people separated from their families know what's happening in the family they left, from the letters and calls – not participating in those events themselves but aware of their existence. During the years spent in his sleeping state that not many people encounter or experience, the old man gained knowledge that only he and the form that was so similar to him could gain.

Barrie had met other people there in the new Neverland; people who sank into a coma but whose damaged brains could still conjure up for them the most fabulous worlds that the human imagination is able to come up with. They shared some collective knowledge on the rules that their created worlds were ruled by. Not that there were many people who were comatose even for roughly as long as James, since he was just young Jimmy was. Elaine Esposito, another "eternal child" was the closest to him in terms of the similarities they shared. She had spent 37 years in the world she created to soothe her loneliness into which she sank since at age six when she didn't wake up from an appendectomy. She created a wonderful world full of magical animals which played with each other in an enchanted wood, doing all those things little Elaine herself couldn't do in her condition. It was Elaine's idea for a world which James decided to borrow quite recently. The world of a magical land where Peter, his alter ego, could frolic was fascinating but James couldn't pretend that he wasn't already bored with this world a bit.

As fascinating as Neverland was, it had lasted in his mind for so many years that he felt the need for a change. Shortly before his body's condition worsened, the old man fell in love with the idea of the world of anthropomorphic animals. Not children, like in the fantasy he was spinning for all this impossibly long time but animals – as Elaine liked to imagine. Recently, shyly, almost as if embarrassed a bit that he dared to "betray" his fantasy he kept for many, many years, James started to reimagine his world. He did it just from time to time but even this stopped due to the state of his health which started to get worse, entailing the destruction of Neverland. He swore to himself that if his body would manage to get better, he would concentrate on making Neverland assume this new shape. Like from Elaine's fantasy. Some of the characters she invented, died with the death of the world they lived in which followed the death of their creator. Some of them got a new shape, transforming into different forms, different entities, as real as they ones they were but at the same time different. It was like the very idea lived on, only replaced by another aspect of it.

But just now Mr. James Matthew Barrie couldn't concentrate on making the world from his fantasy assume a new shape, even if he wanted. There was something seriously wrong with his body – he felt it and it was the part of this knowledge which came to him in this very world. He could come back to his body whenever he wanted but even while out of it, leaving it behind like some sort of empty husk, he could know in some mysterious way he couldn't describe to anybody that something wrong was happening. In the same way the old man whose spiritual essence greeted the children whose creator he was, knew that they should leave the world he had made. Salima was needed by the doctors from the hospital to help them. And as for the children… well, they were seen by the staff of the hospital so Miss Junaid the old man came to like would have to spend a lot of time explaining to the others who saw them coming into the room what she did with the children. But now she didn't need to. They came back through the bridge suspended between both the worlds, finding themselves in the room where the medical devices were making one hell of a noise.

The atmosphere in Salima's house after their return, which took place the previous day, could be described only as strange. The feelings which embraced the Neverland children after they came back were a mixture of fear and some kind of anticipation of what was coming. Sometimes it's better when the anticipation just ends, regardless of what results it entails and this is what the young Neverlanders would have thought if they were able to think more clearly. What happened soon after they were back in the hospital room, deprived them of any strength and it concerned not only those who were left home but also the healthy participants of this new magical trip to Neverland and back.

Now, in the hospital, a lot could be said about the commotion with Mr. Barrie with whose body something seriously wrong was happening which started at the moment when they came back – Salima needed to take only one look at the machines before she ran out of the room only to return with other doctors who told the kids to go out so they could perform their mysterious procedures on James Barrie's unresponsive body. Stunned enough by this meeting with someone whom they had thought to be sleeping for more than half a century and coming to the conclusion that the truth wasn't exactly as they thought it was. Along with the sharp and sudden return to the room before they had any chance to ask anything and later the fuss with Barrie's body (they didn't need to ask if it was something serious), the children didn't protest against being pushed out of the room. They only thing they were told, but for the impatient order to go out they heard from the mouth of the doctors, was the only sentence that came out of Salima's mouth: "Go back home."

So they did. They weren't needed at the hospital where the fight for the life of their creator was taking place and did not need to be informed that their absence in the hospital was the most proper thing they could do – in this way not only did they not disturb the doctors but also gave their friend Salima the opportunity to get away with the necessity of explaining what exactly they were doing there. The medical staff would certainly want to know their names and how their family was. So eluding the questions, the children made their way towards Salima's house quickly and trying not to think of James' words about the new form they were likely to assume after his death. The air of the early spring was warm but it was rainy, as if even the sky was mourning over their dying creator.

But that had all happened yesterday. Yesterday when the trend of events still seemed relatively good, in spite of some of them being ill, their creator's worsening state of health and similar things. But now all of them were already ill. More ill than they were at the beginning. They couldn't even gather their thoughts properly. The only thing they could do was lie helplessly, forgetting about everything they experienced. All of them were ill, stricken with this mysterious illness which wasn't an ordinary disease of body. Peter Pan. Wendy and her brothers. Peter Pan's band of the Lost Boys. Tiger Lily. Even little Tinkerbell in the doll's bed. They laid with no care, for Salima was still in the hospital and Mr. Stuart, all of a sudden couldn't go to take care of him for some reason. He had to fix something important and couldn't go to Miss Junaid's house to check how the Neverlanders were doing. So they laid alone, slowly losing their memories on Neverland, indifferent to everything, waiting for the return of Salima who was one of the few things they could still remember. The memories of all the wonderful adventures they had had in Neverland were slowly fading away, same as the memory of the destruction of the land they were from, their meeting with James Matthew Barrie the previous day and everything else.

It wasn't like they didn't remember anything but they were becoming more and more indifferent to this still slowly decreasing set of memories which still existed in their heads. And even those were fading away. One by one. They started to forget who they were, that once in the past they were the children from sunny Neverland, taking pleasure in swimming in the waters of the Lagoon of Mermaid and fighting pirates. They even started to think that they were someone else. Not even children any more. Their imagination let them believe they were animals, as if the animal skins they used to wear were their real skins.


	12. The Final Change

"So we lost him," said Salima quietly. Only silence answered her. Her friends from the hospital didn't have much to say about the death of the man who was the most famous patient in Great Britain. For the last several decades they took care of him with devotion they could show to their own grandfather. Or their own son – somehow, when they thought of James Barrie, the image of the young boy he once was seemed to slip in their mind, replacing the one of an elderly gentleman they knew well – or at least, whose old weakened body they were familiar with.

The old man never woke up from the coma that he had sunk into after the accident that winter, so many years ago where he would he would eternally remain a child. An eternal child sleeping his eternal dream. And now the dream was finished. Finally, after seventy-four years of deep sleep, the dreams, whatever they could be about – only Salima and the Lost Children who were home now knew this – ended. They tried to save his life for the last time, help him once more, making his existence longer, but it wasn't possible. For a moment it seemed that they succeeded but no, the screen of the machine the man was plugged to showed just a flat line. The attempts of reanimation were over. There was nothing more left than to cover his face with his quilt which Salima did before they left.

Now she was standing with a small circle of her friends and coworkers, still shivering a bit. Not only because the death of her famous patient made an impression on her although it had indeed. However she was used to death being a doctor, nor because she knew soon she'd probably have to face the journalists from some tabloid who would arrive here like gloomy vultures and would put a microphone under her nose to interview her about the last moments of the life of Mr. Barrie. No, the reason of her fear she was feeling at this very moment was quite different and to check if she was right being afraid she had to go home.

James Matthew Barrie felt free. Yes, the feeling of this amazing freedom was mixed with mild sadness that his life, even if limited to the monotone whiteness of this small separate hospital room, was getting near its end, but the feeling that encompassed him at this last moment of his life as his bodiless spirit was floating above the room observing the efforts of the doctors, was the one of total and absolute freedom. Absolute, euphoric freedom that only grew stronger in him as he saw the familiar bluish fog formed in a shape of tunnel, this time, not a door. He didn't need to summon the portal; it was like it found him on its own. Taking one last look at the doctors, he entered the tunnel.

As he was floating through the tunnel, a new feeling was added to the mixture of the ones he was experiencing. The one of awareness of anything connected with Neverland. Out of a sudden the man knew what was going to happen to the Lost children (and one small pixie who went a long path from a plush toy to an entity of flesh and blood). And to Neverland he was now going to be a benign ghost of. He knew now what shape the transformation of it was going to take. He knew it exquisitely well. He smiled slightly, with a smile which made his face look like a face of some benign divine entity could look like. The face of a young man; if he could look at himself at this moment, he would see himself as a young man now, not older than his twenties. The body of an old man wasn't trapping him now. But even if he knew, if he was able to take a look at his now youthful face, he wouldn't care – there was another thing he was thinking about now. The new Neverland and its transformation. The man saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Now the tunnel with a light at its end had a different meaning for him. The man smiled once more and entered the light.

The Neverlanders knew their end was getting nearer and nearer – with delusive slowness but inevitably. They could feel it with every breath they were taking. Not that it was causing them any problems but every passing moment, every second took their memories into oblivion, putting another set of memories into their minds, taking them into a different world – different from the one they were in now but also different than the one they left and which they almost didn't remember now. They were changing. They weren't wearing their animal skins they were wearing at the moment of their Neverland exodus but they felt animals more and more – a weird feeing which though they couldn't reject.

"What a fluffy fur you have, Peter," said Nibs, smiling a slight dreamy smile, as he reached his hand towards his friend, feeling not the human skin under his fingers but the softness of the fur he was seeing in his imagination. If someone was able to see them, they wouldn't see anything else than just a group of children but what was changing their perception of the world was a power strong enough to make them see the images which weren't there. "Pretty fur, so glistening and what a nice shade it has… like honey.

Peter Pan smiled back. "Yours is pretty too," he said in a soft voice. And your ears… they are pretty and long as well…"

Tinkerbell was lying apathetically in Wendy's lap. She was touching her fairy wings, having her face also adorned with this dreamy delicate smile of a lotus eater; just smiling and stroking her fairy wings… wait – her wings were not the fairy pair of ones but they were covered by bird feathers. She didn't feel like changing her position on Wendy's lap… which now wasn't an ordinary lap; Tinkerbell was resting now in some sort of skin bag which was very fitting Wendy. There was still a lot of place in the bag; someone else could fit in as well – maybe young Michael? His face, covered with delicate brown fluff, like the one which covered the face of Wendy, his sister (who now, in this new form, was so much more similar to him; quite like their sanguinity wasn't the one between of sister and brother but rather mother and her young son) reflected youth and innocence.

They all looked so different. Small Tootles with his very pink skin and big ears looked nothing like the boy he was now but it was him, with no doubt. Slightly in his fur covered with a stripe pattern. Cubby on whose face was now a strange expression of eternal depression frozen – the boy seemed the embodiment of pure gloom.

The change was almost complete. There was no time left for them in this very world but… well, maybe some other world was hiding something for them and they only needed to enter it to find it? They were lying in apathy, able to look at each other and themselves, not remembering who they were. Not even the very term "Neverland" wasn't able to elicit any memories on this land from them.

Salima was walking quickly home, fearing of what she could see there. She managed to avoid staying in the hospital as her friends were convincing her to – after all, as Dr. Kimball and Dr. Merring – the one Slightly was based on by Barrie – light heartedly said, there was not such a good chance to see their photos in some tabloid in the closest future – Dr. Merring phoned one of those newspapers to inform them about Barrie's death. A great treat for a newspaper like that, no one needed to tell her this but she wasn't going to take part in any of it. For her, the most important thing now was going home to see what was happening with the children. Were they alive? Or maybe the energy animating their so real looking bodies so far hadleft them, leaving the empty husks behind at the moment of James Barrie's death? She cursed at herself that she didn't tell them before how to use the phone. She could phone them to ask how they were feeling… actually, even if she phoned them just now, one of them would pick up the reciever to check why it made such weird noises, would hear her voice and try to answer.

But she ultimately concluded that the best choice was going home and checking the situation on her own. Her feet were carrying her fast to her small house near the hospital. She was glad that she managed to find a convincing excuse from staying with her friends to talk about Barrie's death. And about Natalie. The news was that the young woman had woken up from her weird half-catatonic state – only to start to claim that she lived somewhere in the Wood– this new idea replaced the one which made her claim she was a fairy. But Salima wasn't particularly interested in the fate of the young worker of the hospital and went out. Now she was heading towards home, with every step more and more unsure of what she was going to find in there.

"We are not where we should be," said Tootles in a bit more conscious voice, looking around.

"You are right, pig," replied Cubby in this new, gloomy voice, so unfitting him when he was still himself. He also seemed to recover from this new sudden weakness a bit.

"Don't call me Pig," said Tootles. "I'm not a pig. I'm…"

"Don't tell me this place is the one where we belong!" cried Slightly in his new, energetic voice, interrupting his friend. He too looked quite aware of everything that was happening around. He was fixing his eyes on something on the other side of the room that appeared a moment ago and seemed to softly seduce them, convincing them that they should come closer and then all of their problems would be solved. "If you aren't going to agree with me on this, then I'll bounce you all! I'll bounce you into this… this thing that is there!" With those words, the ex Lost Boy came nearer the wall to take a look. And his companions followed. To take a look at this mysterious, delicately glistening, swirling blue fog. It looked so tempting… so seductive, as if you could hear its sweet voice telling you into entering it, seeping into your ears. Just like in their other life they didn't remember any fragment of it now, the ex Neverlanders one by one, entered the fog.

Salima opened the door. If she came back half a minute ago, she would have seen the change that took place in the children. And that they couldn't be called children any more. The only thing she saw was the orange fur of Slightly, entering the portal as the last one and the last noise – the noise made by Tinkerbell's new wings. She never realized what she really saw. All that she knew was that her friends were most likely lost forever for this world after Barrie's death. And this was what she was almost sure of as she waited for them for the rest of the day and finally concluded when they didn't come back.

That night she couldn't sleep well, tossing and turning in bed, recalling her adventures with the children through and through. The next morning she came back to work to see her workmates on the first page of The Sun, smiling unnaturally, quite as if they were posing for the photo on a much more cheerful occasion than someone's death. Later that day, she went to a flower shop after work and bought twelve roses. White ones because white symbolized innocence. Like the innocence of the souls of children. The Lost Boys and the Darlings. And Jimmy, of course. Jimmy, the Eternal Child. Puer Aeternus.

Coming home, she attached small labels to them, ones with the names of the children and their ages. The ones she gave to them once – ordinary, not raising any suspicions names though none of the children were ordinary. Wendy (11), John (8), Michael (4), Johnny (9), Dave (9), Kevin (10), Chris (8), Mike (6), Peter (11), Lily (10) and Bella. Bella like Tinkerbell. It sounded like this, at least. Here Salima hesitated for a moment putting the age but finally decided on 15 – Tink's capricious behaviors made her think of a spoiled teen, Salima recalled with a sad smile. Now the names she once made for them could be of use. Now probably she wasn't going to see them anymore and those flowers were everything she could give to them now.

She bought two big bags of flower soil in the flower shop as well. And late in the evening the woman sneaked into the closest graveyard to, under the cover of the night hiding her well from others, scatter a small grave in the corner and put the flowers on it. In the moonlight, this symbolic mould looked quite like the symbolic grave it was. Maybe some person who would see it the next day was going to think that it was made by some eccentric old lady who made it for her numerous siblings or friends maybe who all died in some plague many years ago. Such things used to happen all the time back then.

Salima looked at the flowers for a few minutes and later, with a sigh, went away. She saw that the closest tombs to her symbolic one were ones belonging to very young children. Walter Stephen Matthews and Phoebe Phelps, these were their names. Young, innocent children, dead too soon but they at least had their parents who still remembered them. And the Neverlanders were going to be remembered only by herself and late Mr. Barrie's old friend. Salima sighed once more and came back home, going to bed earlier than usual but it was what she needed. She soon fell asleep. Barely a few minutes later the moon lit the smiling face of the woman on his face there was peace. The corners of her mouth were twitching slightly, like the dreamer was sleeping about something pleasant. If someone was there with her at this moment and could read her mind, they could see the vivid images of her dream – a dream about a little Indian girl playing with her friends in a land named Neverland.

But no one was looking at her at this moment. Neither her hospital workmates, nor her young friends (even if they could remember her now) nor even Barrie. He had much better things to do. Like observing with silent fascination the extent of the changes that took over the magical land which was once known by its inhabitants as Neverland.

Once – when was it? Nobody remembered; not they at least – they were children from the sunny Neverland; loyal friends who were spending whole days splashing in the warm waters of the Mermaid Lagoon and roaming the Neverwood in search for a new, great adventure. Those days, though, belonged to the past. The land they once used to live in sill was a sunny place in which you could have many adventures but it visibly changed.

The group of friends that came to exist in one man's in coma imagination wasn't bothered by this. They still could have fun and that was was really mattered for the entities dressed in animal skins who were playing in the wood like they never knew anything else than it. Animal skins? No, these were their real skins, real forms. Rabbit, donkey, bear and many others. But the fact of this sudden transformation didn't matter for them. What mattered was the fun they were having now in the wood conjured up by the vivid imagination of Barrie. Great fun, with no doubt. The greatest fun in the greatest place that could be. In the Hundred Acre Wood.

**The End.**

**Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed this.**


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